Mumbai Metro Crosses 60 Crore Ridership Mark: Here’s What You Didn’t Know About It

“Be like a train; go in the rain, go in the sun, go in the storm, go in the dark tunnels! Be like a train; concentrate on your road and go with no hesitation!” said Mehmet Murat ildan a noted author once. Cut-to today, this statement of his, couldn’t have resonated more, given the metros in Mumbai have come out to form the heartline the way people travel in the city, if not lifeline. With its completion of five years ever since June 2014, it crossed the ridership mark of 60 crores in 2019 in the month of October.

As a matter of fact, in the first year of its operation itself, setting an unprecedented benchmark for public transportation by way of metro, from June 2014 to June 2015, Line 1 transported over 92 million commuters, and made over 130,000 trips, covering a distance of over 1.4 million km. Further, the line carried an average of 2, 63,000 commuters on weekdays. As of today, Mumbai Metro One operates 422 daily trips on weekdays.

Some Facts & Figures:

For a city where life is measured by the amount of time you put in travelling, it is just not the sheer number of people that the Mumbai metro carries that matters. The story goes beyond that. Here are some quick facts and figures to give you a pulse.

1.  It is safer compared to the suburban stretches, where eight people reportedly die daily, while crossing the tracks or falling off the train as people jostle to get in and out.
2. The average road travel time from Ghatkopar to Versova which gets drastically slashed from 120 minutes to a little over 20 minutes.
3. Headway on the line is 3 minutes during peak hours and 5 minutes during non-peak hours (11:30am and 4:30pm).
4. The footfall on top 3 routes for Andheri to Chakala, Ghatkopar-WEH-Ghatkopar and Andheri-WEH-Andheri is 6.17 lakhs, 5.49 lakhs and 3.40 lakhs respectively.
5.  As of now it still maintains its count of being the 8^th highest passenger density of any metro line in the world.  
6. The metro has spacious stations, concourses and refreshment facilities, besides ATMs. It also has interchange facilities with important railway stations like Andheri and Ghatkopar.
7. In early January 2019, a strike by BEST staffers saw a spike in the ridership of the Metro and the Monorail.
8. Daily ridership crossed 500,000 for four consecutive days with an average increase of 55,000 per day with ridership touching 520,000 on 11 January.
9. It operated 1, 35,248 trips between October 2018 and September 2019 with punctuality performance of 99% and train availability of 100%.
10. Also, there have been celebrities who preferred traveling from metro over their cars like Akshay Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan who took a metro to attend to a friend at a hospital and to save himself the trouble of being stuck in traffic and Salman Khan who launched the season 13 of Big Boss by travelling through Metro.

On concluding notes, Mumbai Metro has drastically changed the way the commuters travel in the city. Also, it has lent them with the much-needed avail from the commotion that comes from traveling in the bustling local trains.