The Non-Motorized Transport (NMT)–Metro Nexus: Sustainable First/Last-Mile Connectivity to Metro Stations in Nagpur, an Indian Mid-Sized City

Abstract

Mass rapid transit can reduce congestion, emissions and road-safety externalities in rapidly urbanizing cities, but only if passengers can conveniently reach and leave its stations — access and egress are often the weakest link in the door-to-door journey. This reciprocal relationship, in which Non-Motorized Transport (NMT) provision shapes metro accessibility and ridership while metro investment creates the case for NMT infrastructure spending, is termed here the NMT–Metro Nexus. This paper is a structured literature review of 99 sources (92 via a documented search-and-screening protocol, plus 7 later additions; see Methodology) from Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar, organised across four themes: sustainable public transport in Indian cities, travel behaviour of NMT users in station catchments, policy and planning frameworks, and public-transport accessibility and NMT integration in Indian metros, using Nagpur Maha Metro as a contextual, illustrative application rather than an empirical case study. The review compares findings across contexts, notes where Tier-1 (Delhi, Mumbai) and Tier-2/mid-sized-city evidence diverge, and identifies three gaps: limited station-level empirical evidence for Indian metros, no integrated NMT planning framework, and limited attention to rapidly motorising mid-sized cities such as Nagpur. Drawing on accessibility, distance-decay and node–place theory, the review interprets station catchments as a distance-decay function of access-mode speed, comfort and safety rather than a fixed radius, and reads Nagpur’s stations as exhibiting a node–place imbalance in which line-haul capacity has outpaced first/last-mile place-quality. Building on this evidence, the review proposes a preliminary NMT-catchment planning framework pairing distance-based catchment bands (walking, cycling, feeder Intermediate Public Transport) with four integration dimensions — physical, network, fare-operational and institutional — plus indicative implementation steps for Nagpur Metro planners; the framework is conceptual and requires station-level validation before wider application.