Lahore Metro: the first step in the nation’s mass transit infrastructure

Almost three years ago, as Pastor Hanooq Haq climbed up to the dais for special prayers on the first Sunday of 2018 at the St Andrews Presbyterian Church in Lahore, he was addressing a community facing an uncertain future.

Outside the Church, after a long wait of nearly two years, work on the Orange Line Metro Train (OLMT) project was coming along at full throttle. “Before we begin our special prayers, I wish to update you on the happening in and around the Church,” begins the Pastor. 

“As you know, the Orange Line is a huge project, and while we have been praying that the construction remains outside the boundary walls of our church, God did not will this to happen.” Outside, the 158 year old boundary wall of the church lay in ruins – and the house of prayer naked to the elements as 60-feet tall drills, cement mixers, bulldozers and cranes operate in what was once the church’s garden.   

St Andrews was one of the 11 culturally important heritage sites that the Supreme Court had declared needed special protection because of the threat they faced from the construction. In 2018, sceptics of the OLMT project had declared the church would fall. Today, its boundary wall has been rebuilt higher than ever, the government has footed the bill for general renovations, and a track of the Orange Line sails above St Andrews, carrying passengers across a 27 kilometer corridor in one of the busiest stretches in the entire city. 

There was never any doubt that the OLMT was going to transform Lahore, and transform it for good. The question that had caused divisions and raging battles in court was whether or not it was worth the risk to the city’s historic cultural fabric. That argument, in itself, was a fair one. It was also fair to question whether there were better ways to have built such a mass transit project. 

What is not fair, however, is that the desire to put the OLMT down has resulted in claims from detractors that public transportation is not a beneficial public good to be spending money on. 

That is balderdash. Cities like Lahore need public transportation. The access to mobility in an ever expanding city like Lahore can be an economic gamechanger for huge swathes of the working class population. And rhetoric that makes light of the importance, or cries foul over the cost of mass transit does a disservice to its importance. 

Yes, public transportation comes at a high cost. It is expensive, time consuming, and difficult to build, and then it also requires subsidies, attention, and upkeep. But that is precisely the point. Projects like the OLMT never make a profit because they are not supposed to. They need to be sustained through subsidies precisely because facilitating mobility for those that cannot afford cars or motorbikes is a government priority. 

In October this year, the OLMT was finally inaugurated in Lahore by Chief Minister Usman Buzdar at the Deran Gujran station. Only a few miles away at Jain Mandir, workers of the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) held a seperate innaguration for the mass transit project.

This is the story of the OLMT. How it was vital for Lahore, how it has transformed the city, and how it could have been done better. But it is also about the importance of mass transit projects, and why they should not be the battleground for such bitter political divisions. 

The need for mass transit 

With an estimated population of nearly 13 million people, Lahore’s roads see a staggering 8 millions daily motorized trips to work, shopping or recreation other than walking. And over the years, this trend has only increased. Rapid growth in population and increasing vehicle ownership have steadily worsened the traffic congestion in Lahore. 

In fact, as of February this year, data collected by the Motor Registration Authority showed that there are a total of about 6.2 million vehicles in Lahore. There are as many as 4.2 million motorcycles in Lahore. The motor vehicle population in all of Punjab is 19.6 million, meaning Lahore makes up 32% of the vehicles in Punjab. 

The major reason why there are so many vehicles in Lahore is because the city has expanded over the years, and people need to travel long distances within Lahore for work. This has caused a massive increase in the number of motorcycles on the roads, since without a strong public transit system, it becomes the cheapest way of transportation. 

Motorcycles have sprouted a wide range of companies producing them in Pakistan, with the traditional Sohrab and Honda market now being given competition by the likes of Road Prince and Habib. In fact, the lack of transportation infrastructure is bad enough that the bike lending business is spread on the small scale all over Punjab, and particularly in Lahore, often trapping people in debt. 

With all of this, a project like the OLMT has been imagined for quite some time. For starters, it would cut the travel time from one end of the city down to 45 minutes. Currently, this time can be anywhere from two to five hours. A project like the OLMT has the potential to change the skyline and structure of Lahore, but also the lives of its inhabitants. The only question is, how efficient has the OLMT’s construction been, and is it the ideal mass transit system for Lahore? 

The Orange Line 

The OLMT is not Lahore’s first dalliance with a rapid transit metro project. And if things go according to plan, the route that the OLMT covers is not supposed to be the only one in Lahore that is serviced by a metro train system. The idea is to have similar Green, Blue, and Purple line projects over other routes in the city, that would connect the city in a web of public transport. The main source of transportation would be the rails, and then on the ground there would be feeder busses that would operate on the roads. 

While the OLMT was vociferously branded as a project of the PML-N and later finished by the incumbent PTI government, the project actually stretches over the span of three provincial governments. 

The first time the idea to identify potential mass transit corridors, followed by a broad assessment of patronage and engineering constraints in those corridors, took place in 2007, under Chief Minister Chauhdhry Pervez Elahi’s PML-Q administration. They identified four different corridors that would eventually be interconnected. 

The Green Line would run from Ferozpur Road, through Mall Road and all the way to Shahdhra. The Blue Line would cover the area from Township to Jail Road with Gulberg in between. And the Purple Line would start from the Bhatti Gate of the Old City and stretch through Allama Iqbal Town, all the way towards the Lahore Airport and Cantonment.  

But it was the Orange Line route that was chosen to be the first one to be built, based on the forecasted passenger demand in the area. The Orange Line would start from Ali Town, pass through Thokar Niaz Baig, Bund Road, Chauburji, Anarkali, Lakshmi Chowk, Railway Station, University of Engineering and Technology, Shalimar Gardens, Islam Park and ends at Dera Gujran. While this is a significant chunk of the areas surrounding the Old City of Lahore, the alignment follows the Multan Road corridor from Thokar Niaz Baig up to Chauburji, then via Lake Road, Mcleod Road, Nicholson Road to the main Railway Crossing to reach GT Road and follows GT Road till interchange of Lahore Ring Road.

The feasibility study of this 27 kilometre route was also done in late 2007, and the PML-Q government was prepared to go ahead with the project. However, after the general elections in 2008, the PML-N and Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif came back into power in Punjab.

A fan of visible development and infrastructure, the Chief Minister was keen on making the project his own, but kept it on the backburner. In 2013, when the PML-N would also come to power in the center, the Chief Minister would finally make his move, and initiate the OLMT project as a part of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). It would follow the same route as the original plan the PML-Q government had, and would even begin with the Orange Line. However, there would be one big difference. A difference that would change the outlook of Lahore forever, and perhaps irreversibly. The original plan was for a completely underground system. Instead of that, Shehbaz Sharif was looking to draw lines in the skyline.

The impact 

Here is a fact. The Orange Line Metro Train Project is going to change lives. For someone that has to travel up to 27 kilometres on foot, on a motorbike, or by hopping from one wagon to another, an airconditioned and subsidised facility like the OLMT is a gamechanger. People can travel farther for work, they can have the assurance of comfortable and cheap travel without worrying about fuel costs.  

According to both government and third-party estimates, once inaugurated, the Orange Line Metro Trains are estimated to handle 30,000 passengers every hour. With a planned operating time of 05:30 to 23:30, it would mean 200,000 commuters using the service every day, a figure expected to rise all the way up to at least 500,000 commuters within three-years of inception, meaning an estimated eventual hourly usage by nearly 50,000 people. 

Powered by a dedicated 80 megawatts of electricity by the Lahore Electric Supply Company (LESCO), the 80 kilometres per hour, driverless trains with 24 stations above ground and 2 stations under is a project of certifiable magnitude. And at a budgeted $1.6 billion provided through a loan from the government of China, which is also advising on the project, getting the execution right for a project this big is vital for the Punjab government. But if the project pans out as it is supposed to, there will be great service to hundreds of thousands of people.

But here is another fact. In 2004, the then PML-Q-led government of Punjab had invited international tenders from suitable consultants to embark on a mass rapid transit project in Lahore. “Our government had shortlisted a Hong Kong-based company credited with several successful urban metro projects in the world,” says Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, former Chief Minister. “Systra, a French company, had already completed the reference design of the project in 2007, which included engineering, planning, financial evaluation and other project details.” 

“As per international standards, a mega construction project was considered 30 percent complete once its reference design was ready.” When the PML-N had just created the Punjab Mass Transit Authority in 2012 and were looking to begin work on the OLMT, Chaudhry had claimed that if the government had stuck to their plans, the project would already have been completed. And most importantly, it would have all been underground.

The project might have been a success, especially since the Asian Development Bank had already shown interest in funding the project. As Chaudhry Pervez Elahi explained, according to the 2006 price index, the cost for the 27 kilometre Green Line that was to begin from Ferozepur Road to culminate at Shahdra was put at $2.4 billion. 

“The Asian Development Bank, due to the viability of the project and the prevalent friendly investment climate in Punjab, had agreed to give a loan of $1 billion at only 1.5% mark-up while for rolling stock, various large investment groups showed keen interest.” 

However, the problem was that the ADB backed project was that while it had a lower cost of borrowing, it was more expensive overall and had a much longer construction time. More importantly, it was a much more invasive project that would require a lot more disruption in normal city life. 

In 2012, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) presented a report to the government of Punjab, which held that for large urban areas, such as Lahore, the only way to effectively meet transport demand is to provide the city with a high-quality public transport system which must be developed in integration with the urban development. However, the underground system they proposed which could have a long term cost of up to $6 billion was considered too expensive. Very soon, Shehbaz Sharif informed the ADB that the loan was no longer required. Instead, the PML-N would look towards China. 

At the time of commencement of the project in October 2015, the 27-kilometre metro train was expected to cost Rs251 billion ($1.6 billion), out of which Rs47 billion ($300 million) was to be paid by the Federal Government of Pakistan and the rest was to be financed through a loan by the Exim Bank of China. The funding was delivered in two phases while the project reached its testing phase in October 2018 and was finally made operational on October 25, 2020 at a total cost of $1.6 billion.

However, the project was now fundamentally different from the original plans. Of the 27 kilometres that the track would cover, only 1.7 kilometres of it would be underground. “The only difference is that JICA was going to be all underground and the Orange Line will be 1.7 kilometre underground. We asked for minimal changes to make it better, and this seemed optimal for certain considerations,” says Khawajah Ahmad Hassaan. He was the Chairman of the Chief Minister’s steering committee on the Orange Line project.

According to him, at a cost of $1.6 billion, the existing OLMT was the best route to go precisely because it was less expensive than the original underground blueprint, and it was also built much quicker. The financing of the project has been a source of controversy. In fact, on its inauguration in October, Chief Minister Usman Buzdar announced the project would be provided with a Rs15 billion subsidy by the provincial government, because of its status as a symbol of the lasting blessings of CPEC. 

To this, a number of economists have raised objections. Dr Aima Mehdi, an economist who teaches at the University of Reading in the UK, for example, tells Profit that the project being so heavily subsidised is a cause for concern. “This project is jointly run by China Railway and Norinco International, one of China’s largest engineering contractors, Guangzhou Metro Group and Daewoo Pakistan, making two Chinese firms its direct beneficiaries,” says Dr Mehdi. 

“What’s more concerning at this point is the fact that the Orange Train project is subsidised and will cost the taxpayers $31.3 million per annum. Public transport worldwide is subsidised but the funds used to pay for such subsidies are generated by business enterprises, however in the present case the subsidy is being directly passed on to taxpayers.” 

However, the subsidy that is being provided through taxation is a policy decision by the government. It is a decision on the part of the government to invest in public transit so that citizens have access to certain basic benefits that will allow them to perhaps prosper economically. Besides, the current overhead project has been significantly cheaper and faster than the JICA recommended plan. However, that is where another set of critics come one. Ones who claim that while public transportation is a necessity, it is at a cost to something much more fundamental – the very essence of Lahore.

The heritage angle

Our story began at the St Andrews Church. That was not without a reason. Back in 2018, the worshippers at St Andrews were seriously worried about the future of their place of worship. The fear was that the Church would simply collapse because of the vibrations from the construction happening around it. Other than St Andrews, 10 other heritage sites including Chauburji and the Shalimar Gardens had also been identified by the Supreme Court as under threat. 

Why was the Supreme Court involved in the first place? Because a case had been filed against the OLMT for violating heritage protection laws. The courts ordered a stay, and work on the project remained on halt for 22 months The court then ordered 31 points to be followed to protect the sites. It would only be after compliance that the construction would continue. To its credit, the government followed the judgement both in letter and spirit. 

Sensors were put up at all construction sites to make sure that the vibration levels from the machinery do not surpass 3mm/s. However, some conservationists felt that the figure was too high, something the government vehemently denied. 

“I don’t want to doubt anybody’s intentions or feelings, but the fact of the matter is that most of the people protesting this project will never actually use it. I would naturally encourage them to use it, but they probably don’t need it,” says Khawaja Ahmad Hassaan. He has a point. 

The Lahore Bachao Tehreek and professors from NCA make up the majority of the dissenters. And despite their insistence that the Church and other structures would fall, they have prevailed, even as the OMLT runs under and over them. 

And that is the crux of the issue. Cities must eventually grow and adapt to the times, even cities as ancient and grand as Lahore. They have to evolve and incorporate changing times. It is illogical to criticise the concept of public transit, or the cost that is associated with it. However, there are always better ways to manage or construct such projects. If Lahore eventually wants to go towards being completely connected through a mass transit system, it may want to consider doing things differently in other corridors.

Additional reporting by Hassan Naqvi