Oct. 14: Calcutta should have 500km of Metro tracks by 2050 to ease its traffic woes, an engineer, specialising in urban transport, said today.

But the total track length - the existing route plus the ongoing projects - will reach just about 125km.

Piyush Kansal, the group general manager of urban transport at Rites, consulting agency under the railway ministry, said new Metro corridors should be planned immediately and steps taken to connect all the routes.

The urban transport expert pointed out that most of the Metro corridors in Calcutta connect only the city's north and south.

They are like parallel corridors. An east-west corridor connecting two north-south lines could create an inter-connected network of three corridors, he said.

Kansal was speaking at a seminar on the East-West Metro.

In Calcutta, only single lines have been planned and such standalone corridors fail to serve the purpose of a mass transit system, Kansal later said while speaking to Metro.

The need is to have a Metro network with as many points of connections between as many corridors as possible, he said.

"There is a Joka-BBD Bag corridor and a New Garia-Airport corridor. If these two lines can be connected through a line that runs east to west and vice versa, it will instantly connect five lines. The length of the (hypothetical) east-west line will hardly be about 10km."

If the New Garia-Airport, the Joka-BBD Bag and the existing Kavi Subhash-Noapara lines are all connected, a person can reach almost every major point only by Metro.

The Kavi Subhash-Noapara track is 27.223km long. The East-West Metro will be 16.6km, the Joka-Esplanade Bag 16.72km, the Airport-New Garia 32km, and the Noapara-Airport-Barasat 18km once the projects are completed. All these will take the track length to 110km.

The Noapara-Baranagar-Dakshineswar project will add roughly another 15km.

Barring this and the East-West Metro, almost all the other projects fall in the north-south corridor.

This raises the fear of standalone corridors that aren't interconnected and as a result won't attract passengers, another expert who was present at the seminar said.

No one from the railways could say by when all the projects would be over.

"It depends on how quickly the state government removes hurdles coming in the way of the projects and how much funds are available," a railway official said.

Calcutta's population is expected to reach 40 million by 2050 and an efficient public transport system would need 500km of Metro tracks, Kansal said. "Planning takes about 10-15 years. So, the planning for more Metro corridors must begin immediately if Calcutta wishes to be ready with 500km by 2050."