Lost in a strange place!

The problems of bus commuters seem to be never- ending. While there are broken bus shelters and unscheduled busstops in the City, there are also bus shelters without any names on them.

These create a lot of confusion among commuters. Many of these unnamed bus shelters can be spotted in areas like Vijayanagar, near Mekhri Circle, Sadashivanagar, Yeshwantpur etc.

Srinivas Sharma, a senior applications engineer, says that he has seen such bus shelters on the stretch to Whitefield.

“Many such shelters can be seen on the stretch from KR Puram to ITPL.These shelters are either covered by advertisements or pamphlets or are broken,” says Srinivas.
He says he has not faced any problem yet since he knows Kannada but it would be terrible for someone who doesn’t know the language and is new to the City.

Frequent travellers say that if the unnamed shelters are in a place they know, they do not face any issues. “But when one goes to a new place for the first time, it can be problematic. Many a time, only the structure of the bus shelter can be seen and there is just a white patch where the name of the bus stop should be mentioned.

Try asking people for help, and they are clueless sometimes,” points out Deepa Prabhu, a third-semester student of RV Institute of Management. She adds that asking the bus conductors is not an option always as most of them are very rude.

“It’s hard to identify if the bus has stopped at a signal or at a stop, when one is in the bus. So the name on the bus shelter is required,” adds Deepa.

Passengers say that the bus conductor or the bus driver do not call out the name of the place at each stop.

So when the bus approaches the bus shelter, if there is no name on them, passengers will be lost. “Sometimes even the bus drivers are a bit confused when there is a bus shelter with no name,” says Shruthi, an undergraduate student from Maharani Lakshmi Ammanni College for Women.

Bus commuters, like Sakshi Agarwal, say that while everyone talks about ensuring safety for women, there have been incidents where the nameless bus stops have lead one marooned on the road for a long while.

“I remember this particular incident where even the bus conductor and driver were clueless about my stop. And when I got down, I had to ask  people present near the bus shelter which place it was. Then I realised that I had got down at a different stop, and had to wait for another bus for almost an hour. It can be pretty scary especially when you’re not were you want to be,” she says.

The BBMP says that they will be reviewing the condition of the bus shelters in the City and fixing the broken ones while making sure that each bus shelter has its name on it.
BBMP commissioner M Lakshminarayana says, “The BBMP will look into the requirements, improve the existing bus shelters and shift the unnecessary bus shelters. Also, we will insist on all bus stops having their place name mentioned.”

Ask him about the budget that has been allotted to improve the condition of the bus shelters and name them properly, and Lakshminarayana says, “There is no shortage of funds since many of these bus shelters get enough advertisements. With these funds, we will make sure that one third of the front panel of every bus shelter has the name of the stop clearly written on it.”