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800 out of 4000 BMTC buses have bilingual destination boards
Written By manjari - 23 September, 2009
Bangalore BMTC Bus language Media Reports Sign Boards Transportation public transport
Only 800 BMTC buses have bilingual destination boards, while the remaining 4000-odd regular buses have Kannada only boards. It is the top political leadership that appears to be standing in the way.
A post has been put regarding the same on Citizen matters:
http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/articles/view/1377-bmtc-buses-signboards-bilingual-bengaluru
According to the post Karnataka Transport Minister R Ashok, in a telephone interview to Citizen Matters, says that “ordinary buses (which have painted destination boards only in Kannada) are used only by Kannada people”.
Says H V Anantha Subbarao, General Secretary of the federation, “We have pointed to the concerned authorities. See, ultimately it's for the public.” KSRTC Staff and Workers Federation is the state-level union for employees of KSRTC, BMTC and state-owned transport corporations elsewhere in Karnataka.
COMMENTS
idontspam - 26 September, 2009 - 18:08
any case, in terms of form, i am not really happy with LED boards.
Meh!
pathykv - 24 September, 2009 - 10:02
It is the 'take it or leave it' attitude of the powers that be which is causing the havoc.
What objection can be there to rewrite the existing boards with larger numbers and the destination on either side in Kannada & English?
Surely it will cost only a pittance compared to the huge losses being incurred on high-end buses.
We should have an early meeting with BMTC to press our views. Will Rithesh/Manjari please try?
K.V.Pathy
s_yajaman - 23 September, 2009 - 12:16
Thanks a lot for this. At least 800 buses have them!
Interesting that minister has such important decisions to make! Interesting also that the unions don't seem averse to having bilingual boards.
Any idea when the move to Kannda only boards happened? In the 80s and even 90s there used to be bilingual boards for at least blackboard buses. Did this happen with BTS becoming BMTC? I was probably not in Bangalore then.
My own problem is not being fluent with the Kannada numerals for some reason. The destination signs are fine with me - I can read them. And frankly I know most of the routes having used them for so long :).
Regardless - the boards need to be bigger so that people can read them from afar and they need to be the same all round the buses.
Maybe some of us can print a bus route guide book and have it published!
Srivathsa
i guess i agree. we have said this before too. bus signs, vehicle number plates are not the place to sestablish primacy of kannada in karnataka. bus signs should be bi-lingual and vehicle plates should be in english letters.
sri. i too have observed that signboards are very small and can barely fit the necessary information even in one language forget two. so that problem no. 1. small size of display .
just an example: http://www.flickr.com/photos/prince_tigereye/3077529742/sizes/l/
another thing, this might look trivial but fonts. when you have to look at things from far, you can only grasp very large scale features and care must be taken that the large scale features dont get masked by unnecessary details. most hand painted signs have lots of squiggly and squirrlies, which sometimes mask details. i have seen this in practice. cant give you a concrete example right now.
but basically lines must be straight, curves smooth and standard and so on. like helevetica font. you can blow it up or shrink it without loosing information. which is not possible with other stylized fonts. hand painted signs are a job for somebody i suppose. but perhaps he can diverse into printing standadized boards using templates? just like they do in publishing?
for a group that boasts multi crore profits, i suppose investing in getting the most basic information right should not be a problem.
narayana would know more.
s_yajaman - 26 September, 2009 - 17:50
But Naveen's post got my goat a bit. I tried hard to stick to the straight and narrow, but this is a bit like a red flag to a bull 
I will request a delete on my post.
Srivathsa
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