While the entire city of Bengaluru has earned a dubious distinction of having some of the slowest moving traffic in the country, the IT corridors here are particularly notorious for their traffic snarls.

In a bid to take at least a few thousand cars off the road, BMTC had introduced a dedicated transport service for employees of tech parks long ago. A senior BMTC official says that the service was launched as far back as 1997 (on the day when BMTC was born) but the numbers have been picking up in recent times.

“The purpose of introducing dedicated transport options for tech park employees was to ease the traffic congestion in the city, to reduce pollution, and to make sure that unauthorised cabs and tempo travellers don’t operate in the city in the name of contract carriers,” he says.

“Tech park employees are part of the public and we have to ensure our services are utilised by them too. The buses are reserved for the employees only during certain times; the rest of the day they will ply on the roads for the general public,” he adds. 

Presently, BMTC is operating 900 buses in this fashion, out of which two-thirds are Volvo buses. Many companies in major tech parks — like Manyata Tech Park, ITPL, Bagmane Tech Park, RMZ Ecospace, EMZ Ecoworld and some companies in Electronic City — have partnered with BMTC to do their bit to reduce the city’s traffic burden. 

Says Pradeep Lala, CEO, Embassy Services, “We provide AC Volvo buses specially operated by BMTC for our business park users, in a bid to reduce both traffic and our carbon footprint. More than 4000 park users have opted for this as it is safe, comfortable and convenient. There are over 700 pick-up points across the city along with a dedicated ‘Embassy Plus’ portal for booking.”

Despite the laudable initiative, certain glitches still remain in the project. BMTC’s dedicated service operates between 8-10 am (pickup) and 4-6 pm (drop) only. This means that a majority of the Tech Park employees working in evening shifts miss out on the service.

“Most of the companies inside tech parks come alive after 5 pm as that is when a majority of the employees start their shifts. Since there are no BMTC buses specially available to us at that time, we use our own vehicles as general transport is time-consuming and risky (for women). The roads leading to business parks are choc-a-bloc during evenings and this is one of the major reasons for that,” says Damodar R, an employee at a tech park.

More buses soon?

“We are planning to expand our fleet. We are doing marketing, we have improved our services and we have got new buses. When the service was started, we personally went and approached all the companies to introduce it to them,” says the senior BMTC official.

For a smooth ride

There are two types of passes available for the BMTC’s dedicated Volvo services — one which the company buys or another for which the employee himself pays, much like a public pass for which you pay in advance.