The Sindh government will seek cabinet approval for a logistics park in Karachi and the purchase of 500 electric buses (Dawn).
The meeting
The Sindh Mass Transit Authority board met under Transport Minister Sharjeel Inam Memon, with Transport Secretary Asad Zamin, Karachi Commissioner Hassan Naqvi, SMTA managing director Behzad Memon and DIG Traffic Pir Muhammad Shah.
The two proposals
500 EV buses for Karachi, and a logistics park intended to keep heavy goods traffic out of the city.
Memon said a logistics park “would be a revolutionary step for the citizens” and would “help significantly reduce the pressure of heavy traffic”.
The part that would matter most
The logistics park, if it is built as described. Karachi’s traffic problem is not only volume but composition: heavy vehicles serving the ports move through the same roads as everything else, and they are the vehicles involved in the city’s most lethal crashes.
A facility that breaks bulk outside the city changes where those trucks go. Buses change how people travel; a logistics park changes what they travel alongside.
The timing, which is not incidental
Diesel reached Rs398.04 a litre today, up Rs19.99 in four days. Electric buses are a fuel-price hedge as much as an emissions policy, and the case for them strengthens every time OGRA revises upward.
What is not established
No cost has been disclosed for the buses or the park, no site has been named, and no timeline given beyond an instruction to complete procedures “at the earliest”. Neither proposal has yet gone to cabinet, and nothing has been approved.
[Image: Fahim Siddiqi/White Star via Dawn]
