BMTC’s juggling act leaves commuters confused
If you hopped onto a ‘Metro Feeder Service’ bus going by what the text reads on the silver and pink design, you might just have landed on an inter-city KSRTC bus.
The Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) had cut down the trips of the Metro Feeder (MF) Service within just one month of starting of operations of Namma Metro, from 1,200 to 918.
Following the change, the Corporation also had to shift a few buses painted with the MF design to general routes. A few non-AC blue colour Tata Marcopolo buses were brought in to run on the MF service routes.
All this has eventually resulted in a very disorderly, confused bus transport system in the city. A BMTC bus no more means what the display board reads and the specific design and colour cannot be indicative of the service the bus is part of.
When this problem was put across to M P Prabhudas, Chief Traffic Manager Operations of BMTC, he sounded rather surprised. “How is that possible? There is no chance this could happen,” claimed Prabhudas.
“It may have happened that certain feeder service buses had to be used in an emergency situation during peak hours on certain routes,” he said. Prabhudas said there are strict instructions given to all bus depot managers and Feeder Bus operators not to change buses.
Even the fact that blue Tata Marcopolos have been running as MF buses to the M G Road Metro station for almost two weeks now was news to the BMTC official.
Prabhudas promised that he would inquire into the matter and ensure no silver and pink colour buses are used for any other purpose, except as MF buses to Metro stations. The Corporation continues to run 60 MF service buses, of which 10 are mini-buses.
A passenger waiting for a Majestic-bound ‘333/335’ BMTC bus on Old Airport Road near Total Mall spoke of his experience when he missed a bus due to the misleading design. The passenger, Aravind Balasubramaniam, said: “One has to wait for at least 15 minutes during noon, sometimes. After waiting for so long, I saw a Metro Feeder Service bus halt at Murugeshpalya bus stop, but I did not bother to look at the LED board. After it left, I saw that it read 333.”
The fact that BMTC has completely killed the concept of ‘Last Mile Connectivity’ by increasing the radius of operations of the MF service from around two km to 10 km, has resulted in people not using it for the actual purpose.
