By Jawad Ahmed ISLAMABAD, Jan. 19 (INP-WealthPK): Pakistan has witnessed one of the fastest urbanisation over the past few decades, among the South Asian region, stretching out the services delivery to the teeming millions. The major attractions behind this fast-paced rural to urban migration can be attributed to an enhanced economic activity, better housing, better schooling and better job opportunities in cities, to name a few. However, due to this influx, cities and other urban centres have grown beyond their administrative limits. According to the UN, over 37% of the total population in Pakistan lives in urban areas, and this figure is expected to increase to 50% by 2050. According to the world body, currently 55% of the world population is living in urban areas, and the figure is expected to rise to 68% by 2050. The UN figures illustrate that around 2.5 billion people worldwide may relocate to urban areas, with Asia and Africa accounting for 90% of this growth. A majority of Pakistan's urban population is concentrated in eight cities, including Karachi, Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Multan, Hyderabad, Gujranwala, and Peshawar. This massive flight of people from the countryside to urban centres is resulting in a growing dearth of essential services such as clean drinking water, schooling, healthcare, and others, putting the policymakers in a quandary. During the last decades or so, the successive governments have launched a few mass transit projects to ease out one of the major challenges this rural-to-urban migration has given rise to provide a decent and affordable means of public transportation to the teeming millions. The province of Punjab took the precedence in this regard by launching a project back in 2013 to develop a modern road infrastructure and provide comfortable, quick and low-cost transportation means to the urban areas of the province. The flagship Lahore Metro Bus Service was also a project that went a long way in addressing the public transportation needs in a metropolis like Lahore. Afterwards, this project was replicated in Rawalpindi, Multan, Peshawar and Karachi. Initially, the governments in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh had opposed the metro bus projects on the premise that these projects required huge investments. However, the success of the bus service in Lahore encouraged the KPK and Sindh governments to also launch their own metro bus services to provide ease of travel to their citizens. Similarly, the Punjab province also took the lead in launching the country’s first modern overhead train service with the name of Orange Line Metro Train, in Lahore, in 2020.   List of Urban Transit Systems in Pakistan (Since 2013)