We toured Karachi's Red Line to bring you this update

Few things test Karachi commuters’ patience like its roads and public transport. For nearly five years, construction of the Red Line has added another obstacle to daily journeys, with traffic diversions, dust and disrupted businesses along the corridor.

We wanted to understand why the project was taking so long. So we travelled the route, documented the work on the ground and spoke to the people living and working beside it.

The idea for the Red Line was born in the early 2010s when it was clear Karachi could not survive its own traffic. The Japan International Cooperation Agency, known globally as the sensei of city surveys, was asked to help. It counted the cars and motorcycles and studied the madness before coming up with a simple plan: Make six Bus Rapid Transit corridors.

BRT, as it is called, is a short form for giving buses their own lane in the middle of the road where no other vehicles can enter. This allows the bus to zoom people up and down a road without being hemmed in by pesky lane-violators.

One of the six corridors, the Red Line, ran from Numaish near Quaid-e-Azam’s Mazar to Malir Halt, a little further after the Karachi airport. This 26.6km strip is Karachi’s busiest and includes University Road. The planners gauged that it would need over 260 electric buses for it. “We found that more than 60 per cent of regular commuters cross Numaish every day,” said Zubair Channa, CEO of TransKarachi, a public sector company in charge of the project.

Back in 2011, that looked like up to 166,000 vehicles a day at the busiest intersections surveyed on the corridor. Roughly half to two-thirds of them are motorbikes and rickshaws, with just 5pc buses.

The Red Line work began in March 2022 and is less than half done more than four years later. Documents of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), a major financier, note April 30, 2027, as the loan closing date.

According to the Asian Development Bank’s project data sheet, the four financiers had disbursed approximately $128.93 million by August 20, 2026. ADB had disbursed $87.63m of its $235m loan, while the French Development Agency and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank had disbursed $21.38m and $19.92m, respectively, out of........

© Dawn Prism