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Hi all,

What is lacking for running an efficient public transport system is 'free movement roads';  even the available buses will be enough at least for another two years without introducing more number of buses,if road infrastructure is improved, dedicated lanes are marked, timings are maintained and scheduled trips are completed according to the running mileages and vehicles are maintained in good repair.

Asuming for a moment privatisation is allowed, it will open up a pandora box of paradoxical situations like - further creating chaos on roads due to manifold increase in number of private vehicles that compete against each other, create chaos and endanger the human species to further maraudering methods of mowing down with uncontrolled speed delivery systems.

No Sirs, let us Prajegalu try to use less and less of our private vehicles, let there be some legislation about the second vehicle registration in a family whether it is two wheeler or four wheeler (I hear that in Australia one cannot buy a second new vehicle unless one dispose off the first vehicle and prove it - E&OE).  May be this type of control mechanism might work to ease the pressure on the roads.

-Vasanth Mysoremath

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VKM Sir,

I fully agree that the process of privatization of bus services will be an ordeal for the bus-using public, pedestrians & other road traffic. It will most certainly open up a can of worms & extract a huge toll from the city before some sort of an order is reached. Most do not realize this & imagine that private buses will operate smoothly & improvements will begin immediately. This is because of frustration with BMTC, which certainly could do with many improvements, though it is the best public bus company in the country, possibly.

Imagining that services will improve immediately if private buses are also commenced is wishful thinking & far from true, unless one does it based on highly regulated models similar to what was done at Indore, which has used a successful PPP model & is providing good services now.

In this country, the govt is involved in many activities that are best left to private parties & their (govt's) job should only be to regulate & govern. As far as public transport is concerned, there are also a few other truths - The sector is more or less a 'No-Profit No-Loss' kind of operation in most cities & is dependent on subsidy one way or the other. Thus, they seek revenues & cross subsidies out of advertising, income from real estate holdings, govt largesse, etc.

In India, there are a few towns that use private bus services with meagre revenues, thus lacking in quality & safety standards & literally fight with one another for business.

Considering that the level of governance within the country is so pathetic, the govt is really in no position to run airlines, hotels, electricity boards, water supply resources, banks, insurance, telecom, etc. & must exit from as many of these as possible, & confine itself to regulatory duties & building capacities for enabling processes to effectively oversee most of these vital functions.

The transition from governmental operation/s to private bodies can be a formidable task, but will have to begin at some stage as loads & expectations from the populace is increasing all the time.

If regulatory bodies such as BMLTA are endorsed with sufficient legal power & capabilities, they certainly can bring about privatization in the city transport sector, but even this is a huge task, given the resistance by almost all govt bodies involved.

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BMTC should ban unofficial boards, like those written by hand. Only boards obtained from depots should be displayed which should be tracked properly.

Actually there are more services during early morning hours due to the ability to sell passes. I think this is because of the commission structure of BMTC. If some one can give more details on the commission structure, the discussion could be more meaningful. They run more buses when they can sell more passes that is in the morning and dont run enough buses in the evening, that is my experience.

Bunching of buses is actually allowed even at the depot where they record the bus timings. If there are thre buses to a destination, the inspectors allow all 3 buses to leave at the same time. Another thing is I believe is that BMTC wants from the drivers is the number of trips not punctuality. If there are 3 trips in 8 hours, I think, the buses complete all the 3 trips in 5 hours and go home!

 

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Naveen,

you have covered most. just wanted to add the below.

 

1.  Need for Bus information system  . Delhi Transit  site looked good to me .  http://www.dimts.in/passengerinfo.html
2.  Need for BRT (now best forgotten for bangalore i guess )
3.  Stop only at premarked Bus Stops/Bays 
4.  Preticketing facilities at major stops (this was on trial run for sometime at shivajinagar   long ago )
5.  queue system for getting in.
6.  Bus Shelters 
7.  No to Rash Driving.
8.  Cleaner Buses (we need clean buses for beautiful bengaluru)

BRT Delhi Bus lanes
 [video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcUqg41uzOQ&feature=related]                     

BRT strives against cars in Delhi
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxKIx1P_8-4]
 

   >>You mentioned that the transport company that you worked for ensures that buses arrive & >>depart on time. Could you tell us if these are intra-city or inter-city services, or are they >>operating for private parties ?

sorry if had created miscommunication in my previous post.

i don't work for any transport company. i work for a software company who's transport
operations is outsourced to a private party.

Venu

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Mr.Venu :

Noted your concerns - that even on weekend mornings with lesser traffic, bunching does occur & that private players could possibly do better. For this to happen, the buses (be these private or BMTC) will have to have DGPS sets installed & a back-office mechanism to track bus movements & intervene to make corrections (as you rightly mentioned).

You mentioned that the transport company that you worked for ensures that buses arrive & depart on time. Could you tell us if these are intra-city or inter-city services, or are they operating for private parties ?

If the services are so good, then we should get such parties to operate & not the rickety, dilipidated buses that operate on Hosur rd & Bannerghatta rd during the day, particularly at peak times only.

Mangalore is a city that I know well. Bus operators are not very proficient & service standards are below average & unsafe, sometimes due to competition on roads between the many small-time operators. The city being smaller with lesser road vehicles, traffic delays are also much lesser & buses are able to maintain better schedules, no doubt.

You also mentioned about a Transport Regulatory Authority (TRA) to be set up with Guidlines on Quality of Service & that each operator must be given specific schedule and tracking to be done by the TRA, similar to Air Traffic.

I have also been mentioning the same, & this will have to be a pre-requisite to any efforts to introduce private players, & experiment on a few routes with high end volvo services to check the outcome.

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