Traversing Kathmandu’s Tumultuous Transportation

Transportation systems in the valley have long been an erratic affair. But what really is the crux of Kathmandu’s transportation woes? And what can be done to make public transport truly public?

Writer: Sajeet Rajbhandari

Every morning at 7, Vartika Upadhyay, 22, gets out of home and waits for her bus. Upadhyay, an undergraduate student, needs to get to her 8 AM university lecture on most days of the week and has an 11km commute to her campus. If the two buses she needs to take are on time and the traffic is good then her commute takes a little less than an hour — but this is rarely the case.

In any city, its denizens like Upadhyay face the need to travel from point A and point B, day in and day out. The better people are able to travel within cities, the more productive the city can be. Good transportation systems are often a good indicator of a booming economy, happy residents, and a healthy environment.

Unfortunately for those of us living and working in Kathmandu, it is pretty evident that the transportation system in the city is far from perfect. One downtown commute is more than enough evidence for this argument. Long traffic jams, clogged up inner streets, countless potholes, and overcrowded Hiaces, are all familiar sights for the Kathmandu commuter.

“I spend over two hours each day on the local bus and my daily commute is a hardship, especially while traveling during office hours. People are stacked beside one another, and the standing room is typically nonexistent. I am very insecure about people on buses because there is no sense of privacy,” Upadhyay shared, “Even if I leave 15 minutes early, I am usually late as it takes a long time to fill the bus with passengers.”

Upadhyay’s daily woes are a shared experience for many in the city. But while there are many complaints to be made about the transportation system in Kathmandu, it is important to do so systematically. Why is traveling in Kathmandu such a mess? What is it that the city actually has been doing wrong? And most importantly, what can we do about it?

A Bumpy Road

Environmental engineer and activist Bhusan Tuladhar is one of many people who commute through Kathmandu each day. Tuladhar shared that he either takes a bus to work or carpools with his wife. 

When asked about what annoys him the most about the transportation system in the valley, Tuladhar lists out a few key flaws in the way Kathmandu travels. Tuladhar who also served as the CEO of the revitalized Sajha Yatayat company shared, “The first problem is the chaotic or unplanned nature of the transport system as a whole. We don’t have a planned approach for transport management that takes into account things like infrastructure, public transport systems, or other forms of mobility like walking and cycling.”

But it is not just that Kathmandu lacks a transportation plan. According to Tuladhar, we also lack institutions that are capable of doing said planning. He argued that while the city does have a Department of Transport Management, it as an institution only focused on things such as the issuing of driving licenses.

Tuladhar is not the first to find an issue with how governmental bodies working in transport have been laid out. The completion report for the Asian Development Bank’s “Nepal: Kathmandu Sustainable Urban Transport Project” mentions, “… Project coordination among the several agencies and local communities proved complex because the implementing agencies were affiliated with different ministries that were not within the jurisdiction of the executing agency, the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport (MPIT). All agencies lacked institutional capacity and the project’s efforts to strengthen capacity and coordination efforts were inadequate…”

“Even public transport is not truly public. It is instead the private sector that has actually been managing public transportation services here,” Tuladhar shared.

The second irritant that Tuladhar points out relates to the city’s notion of what is suitable for it — and what is not. “Kathmandu often equates good transport with wider roads. But good transportation is more than just even asphalt roads,” he said.

Roads are just one of many infrastructural and systemic needs of a solid transportation system. One could make a point that the Kathmandu notion of transportation systems and management focuses too much on roads and cars, rather than on the people that make use of it.

“You can always talk about pollution, bad state of infrastructure, public transport, and such, but the root cause of Kathmandu’s poor transport system comes down to our mentality and the planning system as a whole,” shared Tuladhar.

A Human-Centric Approach And The Opportunity To Do More

So what does a transportation system — or even an ethos — that focuses on the people of a city even look like? 

Shristina Shrestha, an urban planner at Lumanti Sanstha, believes in the viability of a human-centric approach to transport. She points out that our society had gotten so reliant on mechanisms and contraptions that eventually we started to build society to be more adjustable to the capacities of machines, as opposed to the needs of humans. 

“This machine-centric approach meant that roads would emphasize space for bigger cars and parking spots over footpaths,” Shrestha explained. She went on to explain that a human-centric approach would instead focus on the needs of the people over the capacities of machines. “With human-centric design, the footpath would get more priority, the rest of the road might be turned into a one-way, or alternate routes might have been worked out,” she said.

Adhish Gurung, like Shrestha, also believes that Kathmandu as a city could be designed to function much better. Gurung is an urban planner and also an avid cyclist.

“Kathmandu today, really punishes people into not using more sustainable means of travel like walking, cycling, and public transport,” shared Gurung. He believes that if done right, Kathmandu carries the possibility of becoming a very walkable city. He explained that Kathmandu is not very big, and most places have very central locations. This paired with a mostly mild climate throughout the year makes Kathmandu — in theory — a very walkable place.

Read also: How Urban Design and Planning Failed Cycling in Kathmandu

Both Shrestha and Gurung mention that jagged footpaths, poor air quality, and congested public transit do little to encourage more sustainable and manageable commuting habits in the people of Kathmandu. 

“If you give people an opportunity to walk to places safely, they’ll do it. It’s just that Kathmandu is designed against these opportunities,” shared Gurung.

Tuladhar too adds to Gurung’s notion, stating that an average trip in Kathmandu is usually around five kilometers. When put together with the city’s largely young population, this would mean that there are plenty of people who would certainly take advantage of a more walkable and cyclable Kathmandu.

Electrifying Prospects — or the Lack Thereof

In more recent sightings, the country seems to have grown more fond of EVs — specifically private EVs — over the past few years. Reports from the Department of Customs suggest that the nation imported 1,704 electric cars from mid-July 2021 till mid-June 2022, with the number only growing exponentially. This may also be largely in part due to the lenient taxation stance that the government has had on the import of private electric vehicles into the country. 

Even the government itself seems to have hopped onto the EV bandwagon, whether it is the President’s own limousine or a fleet of opulent electric SUVs for miscellaneous government use.

But while having gas-guzzling, smoke-pumping automobiles replaced by cleaner and more silent EVs is certainly a welcome condition for Kathmandu, more EVs only partially help in bettering the transportation system in the city.

For starters, one issue has been who actually buys EVs and what kind of EVs are sold. “Just this past year there has been a huge influx in private EVs, but these new vehicles are usually from the more expensive SUV segment,” said Tuladhar, continuing, “This is because most people who have been buying EVs are people who want to use it as a second car. This means that suppliers are targeting the rich who already probably have a petrol/diesel car, or can afford to be environmentally conscious.”

Tuladhar explained that people with a lower disposable income are less willing to take the risk of buying an EV and instead will naturally go on to opt for two-wheelers and smaller cars. 

But this also means that although more EVs are rolling into town, the number of fuel-consuming vehicles has not gone down either. Instead, private EVs might have only contributed to Kathmandu’s acute traffic congestion, without the city being able to reap the environmental benefits that zero emissions EVs have.

Gurung also adds to Tuladhar’s take on private EVs. “Desiring everything to be electric shouldn’t be our first step. Rather, this is one of the additional things that we want to see happen in terms of changing mobility patterns.”

He went on to add, “More people driving electric still doesn’t solve a lot of Kathmandu’s problems. What we need to do is figure out a way to move a lot of people from one place to the other without creating a lot of chaos or conflict. Gurung suggested that even getting people to ditch EVs and fuel-powered vehicles in favor of traditional buses could do a lot in terms of lowering emissions and traffic congestion.

Tuladhar takes Gurung’s point a step further and dives into the electrification of public transportation. “A private EV would drive around for just 3-4 hours in a day, an electric public bus on the other hand would be in operation for up to 10-12 hours in a day,” said Tuladhar.

But putting electric buses on the city roads is easier said than done. One key problem is the financing aspect of it. Tuladhar shared that the cost to buy a new electric bus is over three times that of its diesel counterparts. Electric buses also require the development of expensive and intricate infrastructures like charging stations around the city. He added that while the EV taxation has been very encouraging to private EV buyers, because of things like these, the cost of electrification of Kathmandu’s public transport is still astronomical. 

Despite all these odds, a few years prior Saajha Yatayat did in fact launch five electric buses that were supposed to run on various routes in the valley. Unfortunately, these buses could never really operate in the valley, especially after the government withdrew support for the project. 

According to Tuladhar, “It’s been a few years that the buses are still lying there disused.” He went on to add, “Since then the government has been given five new buses that were even bigger and fancier. These five buses too have just been sitting there in Lumbini for the past year-and-a-half without the government knowing what to do.”

That being said, Saajha Yatayat has been able to bring a fleet of 40 electric buses into the country. However, only a handful have managed to enter operation while others wait to be approved for road use.

Read also: How feasible is Nepal’s e-mobility plan?

Rapid Solutions

The electrification of public transport however is a right step that might take a very long time, not just with buses, but also with promises such as the fabled metro or subway systems in Kathmandu. 

While metros and subways have been proven to be excellent means of large-scale public transport, they are ludicrously costly to make, and require some serious long-term infrastructural development. Something that really should not be the government’s priority right now. 

Truth be told, given that Kathmandu has neither the user volume nor the funds to actually run a costly metro or subway system in a profitable manner. Urban planners like Gurung feel that starting the construction of such systems might just end with them becoming unused urban relics.

When asked — what a more immediate remedy for Kathmandu’s ailing transport system would be —  Tuladhar, Shrestha, and Gurung all seem to bring up the concept of having a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system in the city.

Essentially BRTs are a high-speed, high-capacity city transit system that operates within its dedicated lanes or roadways. Such a system would ensure a fast transport service where passengers would not have to worry about hindrances like traffic and the availability of buses.

“They’re kind of like an over-ground subway that rides around the city,” Gurung explained. He also shared that while both do essentially the same thing, one kilometer of BRT is going to be a whole lot cheaper to construct and operate than a kilometer of metro lines.

Shrestha too is all for BRTs. She shared that roads such as the Ring Road are perfect for running a BRT system. “I don’t see metros materializing anytime in the near future, but with BRTs, we’d simply be using infrastructure that we already have,” she said.

Read also: What the World’s First Bus Rapid Transit System Can Teach Us

A point to note however is that Kathmandu is a city with a lot of variation in terms of the styles of streets and settlements. While BRT systems would be more than ideal for areas of the city that touch the Ring road, they would not be as feasible around core Kathmandu areas. 

Tuladhar shared that the city needs an integrated transport system — one that takes heed of the diverse juxtaposition that is Kathmandu. He said, “Ason is different from Baneshwor, which is different from Bhaisepati. Clearly in core city areas, like that in old Kathmandu, we need to restrict cars to the extent possible. As opposed to fast transits like that in the Ring road, these areas should be made into a pedestrian’s paradise.”

Shifting Our Habits and Attitudes

Nonetheless, simply having fast buses and electric mobility will do little if Kathmandu denizens themselves don’t evolve their commuting habits.

“Approximately around 27% of all commutes in the city are done via public transport. We need to double, or even triple this number,” said Tuladhar.

Shrestha too believes in making public transport more fashionable. “One can often note that more developed cities tend to have more public transport users while developing cities tend to have more private vehicle ownership,” she shared.

In a 2020 blog titled “Do not park the bus!”Gurung also wrote about the stigma that comes with the use of public transportation. He wrote, “Growing up, I had friends who never took the bus or never wanted to be seen taking the bus. This is not unique to Kathmandu, Nepal. There are cities all over the world where taking public transit, especially the bus, is associated with being poor.”

Both Shrestha and Gurung make reasonable points. Many developed cities often showcase a large usage of, and positive attitudes towards its public transportation systems. Take Hong Kong for instance, despite being one of the most densely populated cities across the globe, it also has a stellar public transportation system that is often heralded for being cheap yet efficient and profitable.

One way to bring about this shift of attitude in Kathmandu is through education, or more so the re-education of Kathmandu’s perception of public transportation. Shrestha for one believes that this re-education should start in school itself. “Much like how we teach kids traffic rules, we should also be talking to them about prioritizing pedestrians and more sustainable means of transport. By teaching them this in their formative years, the city might be better able to create the social shifts that it needs,” she shared.

Tuladhar believes that opinion leaders are also key in making public transport more trendy. He shared that once enough people are willing to take up public transport over private vehicles, there will come a tipping point where people start seeing public transport as the status quo.

Once there is a greater number of users, it is likely that public transport will in turn see greater investments from both government and private parties. 

Other cultural interventions such as stricter rules that ensure the safety of non-male passengers, maximum passenger capacities, and more human-centered plans only add to making public transport more appealing to the masses.

As of now though, citizens such as Upadhyay are still critical of the system, “If given the choice, I would definitely choose to drive my own vehicle, regardless of the cost difference, as I can reach my destination on time and without the hassle of public transportation.”