Why Half of Lucknow’s Commuters Shun Public Transport: New Study Maps the Gaps

In the sprawling north Indian city of Lucknow, the state capital of Uttar Pradesh and home to several million people, more than half of commuters never set foot on a bus, metro train, or shared auto-rickshaw. That striking figure comes from a new study by Preeti Yadav and Soumyadip Chattopadhyay of Visva-Bharati University, published in SN Social Sciences, which used primary survey data to dissect who uses public transport in Lucknow, who avoids it, and why. The findings paint a sobering picture of a city where formal transit systems exist on paper but fail, in practice, to serve large segments of the population. As Indian cities expand at breakneck speed and policymakers push for low-carbon mobility, the research offers a granular, data-driven diagnosis of why public transport ridership remains stubbornly low in a rapidly urbanizing metropolis.

The study rests on an extensive primary survey of commuters across Lucknow, designed to capture not just travel patterns but the socio-economic characteristics of travelers and their perceptions of the transport options available to them. The researchers examined accessibility, usage, and the challenges commuters face when using transport facilities, and then applied a multinomial logistic regression model to identify the factors that significantly influence which mode a commuter chooses. This statistical approach, rooted in the discrete choice modeling tradition pioneered by economist Daniel McFadden, allows researchers to estimate how variables such as income, age, occupation, travel cost, and distance to the nearest transit stop shift the probability of choosing one mode over another. The method is particularly well suited to untangling the competing influences that shape everyday travel decisions in complex urban environments.

The headline result is stark: over half of the respondents reported that they do not use public transport modes at all. The authors attribute this low usage to a cluster of interlocking problems. Inaccessibility is the first barrier, with many residents living too far from bus stops or metro stations to make public transport a practical option. The study notes that distances beyond 800 metres from a transit stop were treated as a threshold of inaccessibility, a walking distance widely regarded in transport planning literature as the practical limit for comfortable pedestrian access to transit. Overcrowding on vehicles compounds the problem, as does the long wait time between services. Finally, the researchers highlight poor first- and last-mile connectivity, the persistent gap between a commuter’s origin or destination and the nearest transit node, as a decisive deterrent that effectively locks people out of the system even when they live within its nominal catchment.

The regression analysis revealed that modal choice in Lucknow is shaped by both who commuters are and how they travel. Among the socio-economic determinants, age, occupation, and household income emerged as significant predictors of transport mode choice. This pattern aligns with a long line of research showing that income strongly conditions vehicle ownership, with rising household earnings in developing countries typically driving a shift toward personal two-wheelers and cars. Occupation matters because different jobs impose different travel demands: a fixed-schedule office worker and an informal-sector worker with irregular hours face very different constraints when deciding whether to rely on a bus that may come infrequently or a private vehicle that offers on-demand flexibility. Age, meanwhile, shapes both physical capacity to walk long distances to stops and attitudes toward crowded public vehicles.

Crucially, the study found that travel-related factors carry independent weight alongside these demographic variables. Travel cost, travel speed, and the distance to the nearest transit stop all significantly influenced which mode commuters selected. This is an important analytical point: it means that even among people with similar incomes and occupations, the practical economics and physics of a journey, what it costs, how long it takes, and how far one must walk, can tip the decision toward or away from public transport. The chi-square tests used in the study to compare transport modes, contrasting public transport and intermediate public transport such as auto-rickshaws against personal modes like two-wheelers and cars, confirmed statistically significant differences in usage patterns across these categories. In other words, the divide between public and private transport users in Lucknow is not random but systematically structured by measurable characteristics of people and trips.

The disparities the study documents carry real consequences for social equity. Transport researchers have long argued that inadequate urban transportation falls hardest on the poor, who cannot afford to substitute private vehicles for missing transit and therefore bear the costs of exclusion in lost job opportunities, longer commutes, and reduced access to education and healthcare. Scholars working on transport-related social exclusion have shown that poor accessibility can entrench poverty by cutting households off from the urban opportunity structure. In the Indian context, previous studies in Delhi, Mumbai, and Visakhapatnam have documented how gender, income, and residential location interact to shape mobility disadvantage, with women in particular facing high costs, limited access, and comfort constraints on public systems. The Lucknow findings add a mid-sized state capital to this evidence base, suggesting that the accessibility deficits documented in India’s megacities are replicated, and may be even more acute, in fast-growing secondary cities.

Lucknow’s experience also illustrates a broader paradox of Indian urban transport policy. The city has invested in modern transit infrastructure, including a metro system, yet the study shows that infrastructure alone does not generate ridership when the surrounding service ecosystem is weak. Earlier research on the operational dynamics of Lucknow’s public bus system documented chronic challenges, and accessibility mapping exercises in the city have previously flagged the mismatch between where transit stops are located and where people actually live and work. The new study’s emphasis on first- and last-mile connectivity echoes findings from around the world that the quality of the walking and feeder experience at either end of a transit journey often determines whether the journey happens at all. Research on metro station access in Indian cities has shown that neighborhood design significantly shapes walk access to stations, while studies of bus stop spacing have highlighted how poorly optimized stop locations can degrade both speed and accessibility simultaneously.

What can be done? The authors advance a three-part argument. First, they call for improving public transit accessibility and service quality, which in practice means bringing stops closer to residents, increasing service frequency to cut wait times, relieving overcrowding, and upgrading the pedestrian environment around stops. Second, they urge better coordination among the city’s public transit systems, so that buses, metro, and other formal services function as an integrated network rather than as disconnected silos that force commuters to pay separate fares and navigate fragmented information. Third, and perhaps most innovatively, they recommend the introduction of intermediate transport modes to reduce costs and save time, positioning shared auto-rickshaws and similar services as deliberate feeder links that bridge the first- and last-mile gap. This recommendation reflects a growing recognition in global south transport research that informal and intermediate public transport, far from being a problem to be eliminated, can be harnessed as a complement to formal transit if properly integrated.

The stakes extend well beyond Lucknow. India’s urban population is projected to expand dramatically in the coming decades, and the transport choices made by city dwellers today will lock in patterns of energy use, air pollution, congestion, and greenhouse gas emissions for generations. National policy frameworks, including NITI Aayog’s vision for transforming Indian mobility, have emphasized the need to shift trips toward public and shared modes, but the Lucknow study demonstrates that such shifts will not occur unless the lived experience of transit, the wait, the walk, the crowding, the cost, improves measurably. Perceived accessibility, as researchers have noted, functions as an indicator of social inclusion in its own right: people who feel excluded from the transport system are, in a meaningful sense, excluded from the city.

The study, which received institutional ethical approval from Visva-Bharati University for 2023-2024 with informed consent obtained from all participants, ultimately delivers a message that is both cautionary and constructive. Cautionary, because it shows that building metro lines and bus fleets does not automatically produce a mobile, equitable city; the connective tissue of accessibility, affordability, and service quality must be engineered with equal care. Constructive, because its regression results give policymakers a concrete checklist of levers, travel cost, speed, stop proximity, and the socio-economic profiles of underserved groups, that can be pulled to make public transport a genuinely convenient and preferred option. For the majority of Lucknow’s commuters who currently vote with their feet against public transport, the study suggests that the problem is not a lack of demand for better mobility but a supply of transit that too often fails to reach them where they live, at a price they can afford, on a schedule they can trust.

Subject of Research: Transport accessibility, public transport usage disparities, and mode choice determinants among commuters in Lucknow, India

Article Title: Assessing transport accessibility and usage in Lucknow, India: disparities and determinants

Article References: Assessing transport accessibility and usage in Lucknow, India: disparities and determinants. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01791-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01791-0

Keywords: transport accessibility, public transport, Lucknow, India, mode choice, multinomial logistic regression, first-mile last-mile connectivity, intermediate public transport, travel behaviour, urban mobility, social exclusion, transit policy