I would like to see a city which has very good city bus facility. Atleast in Bangalore, and Hyderabad, the bus service is very bad, and because of that most of the people who can afford for auto/cab, would not use bus. Eventhough government can do many things to improve this, but, it is not doing it.
Bangalore - Ordinary City buses
Don't think of sitting at any time, unless you are getting in at the starting point. If you are travelling at peak time, then don't even think of comfortable standing.
Bangalore - Volvo City buses
Most probably you will get seat. But, buses are not frequent. Not all routes have volvo buses, and even the routes that have these buses, don't have high frequency. One may have to wait even half an hour to catch one.
Hyderabad - Ordinary City buses
Don't think of sitting at any time, unless you are getting in at the starting point. If you are travelling at peak time, then don't even think of comfortable standing.
Hyderabad - Metro City buses
At peak time, this is as worst as ordinary city buses. At non-peak time, you may get a seat to sit, or you can stand comfortably. Frequency is reasonable, but not very high.
The main reasons for a person to travel by auto or cab are
1.The bus facility is so pathetic that, they cannot afford to travel in that. There are few categories in that
1.1 The person wants to get into the bus, but cannot get in. (This happens very frequently at peak times in both Bangalore and Hyderabad).
1.2 The person wants to stand comfortably.
1.3 The person wants to sit.
1.4 The person wants to travel luxuriously. (We may have to ignore this category, because, they will not travel by city buses).
2.They don't want to spend their time in waiting.
3.They want to go from one place to another place and there is no direct bus facility.
There are many people who are taking auto or cab for the above reasons. If there are 50 people who are taking auto, because they don't want to stand in a bus, then, just by providing one more bus, all these people need not travel by auto. This will make one bus on the road instead of 25 autos (let's suppose 2 people share an auto). That will be a huge saving in terms of traffic, money, fuel, and pollution. According to the recent calculations, the no.of autos in Hyderabad is 1,00,000. (Yes, you are reading correctly.)
We can reduce the no.of autos and cabs by introducing more no.of buses in all the directions, and extra buses at the peak time. By that, we can save money, oil, time, traffic, and reduce pollution. If RTC thinks it will make losses by increasing the no.of buses, they can increase only metro, volvo, deluxe buses etc., with more ticket price. Those whoever is travelling by auto will not mind to pay half of that price for a comfortable travel by bus.
But, as usual government does not do things which will make people happy. If at all, any government wants to do things like this, there are few things called "Opposition parties", and they will opppose it. Some time back, when YSR government wanted to hire private buses, immediately the opposition parties objected and it became one big issue. The objection was RTC will be in losses, if they start hiring private buses. These politicians are forgetting that, government is there to serve people, and not that people are there to serve government. RTC is there to serve people, and it has to do whatever it takes to give comfortable travel. Not that, people have to suffer while travelling to give profit to RTC.
If people like Ambani, or Suni Mittal takes this idea, and starts a new venture in this, then there are people like mayawathi to stop this.
Let's hope, somebody (either government or big players) will do some thing in this.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
the reason why private bus operators are not plying buses in city is because of tariff control.
ReplyDeletegovernment thinks that it is doing a social service by lowering the fares, but in reality it is curbing the profitability and the incentive of the operator to expand its operations.
its simple.. in a free society the private operator might initially charge exorbitantly.. but then seeing the immense profits he is making, 10 more buses will start plying on that route. and immediately the fare will go down...
this is what happens in inter city buses.. everybody is free to charge what pleases them.. but because of market forces the fares r under control.