Title - Crowd-crush lesson Metro didn’t learn

A commuter crush has again crippled Metro Railway in the countdown to Puja, showing that those who run the city’s transport lifeline haven’t learnt from last year’s fiasco.Wednesday saw 7.03 lakh people take the Metro, the highest in a day in its 28-year history. Officials said Thursday’s figure might be higher and Friday could exceed that count.The rush over the past two days resulted in snaking queues in front of the counters, stalling turnstiles and train delays caused by doors that refused to close. Many couldn’t get off crowded trains in the busier stations, pushed back by fellow commuters struggling to get in together.“I was supposed to get off at Central station but I couldn’t. Around 10-15 people boarding together forced me back in. I missed the next station (Chandni Chowk) as well,” recounted Sambaran Guha, who works in a tea broking company.The villains of the commute nightmare were a public transport system functioning at half its strength — around 7,000 buses and 12,000 taxis are off the road because of the fare freeze — and all-day snarls triggered by a combination of bad roads, poor traffic management and me-first motorists.Where Metro Railway failed the commuter is by not preparing for a rush that is only to be expected at this time. Metro’s festival schedule doesn’t start until Sunday (Saptami), which means there won’t be any additional deployment of personnel and volunteers in the next two days either.

“As is the norm, we have a plan in place for Saptami onwards,” deputy general manager Pratyush Ghosh said.

Metro Railway runs 270 trains on a weekday with an average passenger load of six lakh. Wednesday’s 7.03-lakh commuter count works out to 2,600 passengers on each train if distributed evenly through the day, though the peak-hour figure would have been in excess of 4,000. That is almost 10 times the seating capacity of a non-AC rake. “I had never seen such pandemonium at a Metro station in all these years,” said Anindita Basu, who was unable to get off at Esplanade.

When the doors wouldn’t close because of overcrowding, the station managers used the public address systems to request passengers to wait for the next train. Most stations looked understaffed.

It usually takes around nine minutes for people aboard a pair of trains travelling in opposite directions to disperse. Over the past two days, almost every station has reported a pile-up at the exits.

Metro had first faced this problem in the run-up to last Puja. Train services had collapsed on the evening of October 1, Panchami, once a Dum Dum-bound AC rake developed a snag at Jatin Das Park.

Around 5.25 lakh passengers had commuted on that day, officials said. On October 1 this year, 6.93 lakh people took the transport lifeline.

Metro will replace tokens with paper tickets during Puja. “Five lakh paper tickets have been printed so that commuters unfamiliar with tokens don’t face a problem,” an official said.