Journal of Civil Engineering and Environmental Technology Print ISSN: 2349-8404; Online ISSN: 2349-879X; Volume 1, Number 2; August, 2014 pp. 19-22 © Krishi Sanskriti Publications http://www.krishisanskriti.org/jceet.html Assessment of Urban Transport in Medium Towns Shashank Shekhar 1 , Monika Singh 2 1 Centre for Transportation System, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand 2 Dept. of Planning, School of Planning and Architecture Delhi, Delhi Abstracts: India is urbanizing at a very rapid pace still many of the Indian cities are struggling to keep with this fast pace of urbanization. Today with increasing urban population there is growth in demand for urban transport, which leads to increase in private vehicular ownership and decline in public transport share. Cities in India are suffering from severe and worst transport problems like: congestion, parking shortage, traffic injuries and fatalities. Sudden rise in private vehicle ownership, deteriorating public transport service, limited and outdated transport infrastructure with inadequate as well as uncoordinated land use and transport planning are the major concern areas. This paper is a scholastic attempt to understand the emerging issue of transport infrastructure in medium town. Furthermore, it also reveals the need of strategic planning in urban transport infrastructure and recommends planning improvements that would help to mitigate urban transport problem and promote better quality of life in a pragmatic and holistic manner. Keywords: strategic planning, transport infrastructure, urbanization, urban transport 1. INTRODUCTION Transportation is the major problem that today our cities are facing either it is movement of freight or the people both with the increasing time are becoming costlier and slow in functioning. But the main issue to discuss is why this is happening all because we are yet not capable to cope with the pace of development or because of gap between the formulation and execution step. If we consider the development and urbanization one of the factor which is yet slow in medium towns as they are next in queue to develop after the large cities of the nation, but there is also another face of coin which clearly states our incapability of decision making and its successful execution. Further in this paper we will discuss how land use planning and transportation system are dependent on each other and how our medium towns got into this rat race of urbanization. 2. URBANIZATION IN INDIA India shares most characteristic features of urbanization in the developing countries. Number of urban agglomeration /town has grown from 1827 in 1901 to 5161 in 2001. Number of total population has increased from 23.84 crores in 1901 to 102.7 crores in 2001 whereas number. Of population residing in urban areas has increased from 2.58 crores in 1901 to 28.53 crores in 2001. This process of urbanization in India is shown in Fig 1. Urban growth can be attributed to mainly three components 1) Natural increase, 2) Net migration, 3) Areal reclassification. These components have been estimated using residual method.This trend is less observed in developed nations but in developing nations, cities are getting urbanized at faster rate accounting for 68% of urban population in 2000 and 77% (3.26 billion) by 2020 [1]. For the last 30 years, migration has contributed about a filthy of the population; natural urban population growth contributed about 60 % and the rest about equally split between new town formation because of reclassification and urban boundary expansion or sprawl. According to Census of India 2011 there are 7, 935 towns in the country. The number of towns has increased by 2, 774 since last Census. Many of these towns are part of Urban Agglomerations and the rest are independent towns. The total number of Urban Agglomerations/Towns, which constitutes the urban frame, is 6166 in the country. The total urban population in the country as per Census 2011 is more than 377 million constituting 31.16% of the total population [3]. As per Census of India 2011, there are 468 such Urban Agglomerations/Towns. The corresponding number in Census 2001 was 394 whereas 264.9 million persons, constituting 70% of the total urban population, live in these Class I Urban Agglomerations/Towns. [3]. 3. IMPACT OF URBAN TRANSPORT ON INDIAN CITIES Economic efficiency of cities and well-being of urban inhabitants are directly influenced by mobility. Whereas structure and growth of a city is directly influenced by tis transport system. As our metropolitan cities are completely saturated with their extreme limit, considering case of Delhi, as its outgrowth is there in the name of National Capital Region (NCR), and to connect these areas further MRTS systems were introduced so as to lower down the population pressure on the city. After these metropolitan cities there comes the number of our Class I towns, which are next to get influenced by this urbanization factor. As medium towns have lower income