May 10 (TheLedger) - Every government promises to fix Colombo's public transport. None has delivered. The reason is structural, not technical.
Successful transit reforms — Curitiba's BRT, Singapore's SMRT, even Pune's recent overhaul — share a single ingredient: they outlasted the politicians who started them. Sri Lanka, by contrast, has averaged a transport minister every fourteen months over the last decade.
What a ten-year compact would look like
It would commit successive governments to a fixed corridor map, a published rolling-stock procurement schedule, and a simple, audited subsidy formula. None of those decisions are technically hard. What is hard is binding political opponents to honour them through three election cycles.