Metro Train for eCommerce delivery!
As the metro train coverage increases each quarter over the years in New Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad & other cities of India, an idea to consider is using the metro infrastructure for freight to handle the shipping of carton boxes by eCommerce companies.
As of Sep 2022, about 790kms of Metro Train is operational across India & this would reach around 2400kms of reach in the coming years if all the planned, under constructions is finished, these are spread about 15 cities, 11 states in India. Ref : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_rail_transit_in_India
Quick research on type of constructions used across different cities for metros constructions it seems like roughly 70% is elevated, 20% on ground & 10% is underground. Idea proposed in this post is for using the area under the elevated corridor for building a parallel track that can be used for shipping the carton boxes.
Freight Track
Using the already built pillars at reasonable height & wasted space below the metro tracks, could be we consider building a hanging track, kind of a conveyer belt that could be loaded with carton boxes with barcodes of their destination to be dropped off (exactly like the conveyer belts in airport for baggage) at one of the metro stations.
I think this would be a sustainable, efficient usage of infrastructure that is already built that would save a significant amount of fuel, reduce pollution for the cities. Guess the biggest beneficiaries will be eCommerce companies that can setup a fulfilment centres around the metro stations to load the boxes with destination encoded that could be picked up for last mile delivery by road transport team.
Additional Source of Revenue
Given the growth of eCommerce / home delivery growth in past years & going forward, freight track should be able to generate easily 10–15% of additional revenue for the companies operating the metro, and help reach profitability a bit more quicker than currently planned.
Challenges
Needless to say this idea has several challenges, I’m hopeful one of the Metro Corporations would evaluate the feasibility — @OfficialDMRCL BMRCL @HRMGOV
- Conveyer belt would have to split or go around the pillars
- Security / safety of the infrastructure, all the parcels mounted needs to go through a scan before mounted
- Might only be economical, when parcel has to travel at least 10–12kms, shorter distance load / unload overheads might be high
- Only boxes of certain dimensions could be loaded on the conveyer belt, because of space constraint
- On the plus side, this could operated 24x7, and generate good source of revenue for the corporations
