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Sathya Sankaran, Deepak Vijayvergiy, Sanjeev Dyamannavar and80 others like this.
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Ashwin Mahesh There are two major revisions this time from the previous version. One is that instead of a single destination in the city (e.g. G3 goes to Brigade Road), there will be 3 destinations in the city (KBS, Shantinagar, Shivajinagar) for each BIG route. This will allow a lot of criss-crossing within city centre, and allow people to connect from one service to another. Second is that in the outer limits of the city there will be 3 termination points instead of one. I.e. BIG on Hosur Road will go to E City, Attibele or Chandapura. Frequencies will be highest on the most used segments, and this will allow much better fleet utilisation.
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Naveen Patil Will the shuttles penetrate along the Hosur Road - Inside HSR /Bommanahalli/Kudlu/Hosa/Jail Road etc ?
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Ashok Narayanan Smaller buses will be a welcome adoption.
Will destination of existing G4 bus change to Shivajinagar from Brigade road?
It would be great if one of the BIG buses towards South Blr can touch the Cantt station. -
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Ashwin Mahesh Ideally the extensions should be from the 'existing terminal points'. I.e. if G4 went to KBS or Shanti nagar without touching Brigade Road, that wouldn't be directional, particularly. Partly these things are a function of frequencies. If the direction-oriented fleet was doubled, we could easily meet multiple goals, but that needs govt with deeper understanding of the value of BUS in public transport, and correspondingly high investments in this instead of other modes.
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Krishna Kumar Lakkimsetty Ashwin Mahesh Is new BIG system an enhancement to existing BIG10 system? What changes we can expect for G4? What are the new terminal points planned for G4 in addition to exiting Brigade Road? The schema also shows that the different starting points as well(reading something like that in your earlier posts) but you have not mentioned anything regarding that. Can you please elaborate on that?
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Sameer Shisodia No penalties for switching buses will indeed be super useful - look forward to that someday! The directional services should ensure a leaner system with better frequencies and reach.
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Ashwin Mahesh Today's introduction of BIG is only on Hosur Road. As and when other trunks are finalised, I will post the details. We will also update the BTIS web site correspondingly. And I'm sure, so will BMTC.
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Ashok Narayanan I wish BMTC also maintains the colors of the bus consistently. For e.g. when G-4 was introduced, all the buses were of the light green color. Now all colors of buses (blue, maroon etc) run on the G-4 routes. It may seem trivial to focus on colors but that is what is branding.
Slighlty off-topic, Ashwin Mahesh, can you please request BMTC to stop the scrolling of destination boards in the buses? It is very irritating and not friendly at all. Or have two rows fixed with Kannada and English destination, and a third row scrolling with the "via" points? -
Ashwin Mahesh Partly this is because head office in BMTC does not have clear control over the depot operations, and partly this is because of the way buses are rotated during service downtimes. I think it will improve in the coming months. Having a priority direction-oriented network will itself solve some part of this problem.
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Ilot Sea Doc BTW Murali devram and me went to the completed Kodathi depot y day as we had a tyre blow out riught in front of it.. I beleive it is the right place to start the next trunk from we talked about it amongst ourselves but forgot about it as we were late and exhausted after fixing our tyre
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Krishna Kumar Lakkimsetty Regarding the colors of the buses I agree that head office does not have control but color system was maintained VERY WELL for first few years but now one can see Green buses for non-Big10 routes and non-green buses for Big10 routes every single day.
Not a BIG10 related issue but I see BMTC using buses of different colors indiscriminately/randomly. The Red colored buses introduced recently looks exactly similar to Volvo buses which confuse commuters all the time. They have also introduced Maroon color buses both in Volvo and non-volvo segment which is totally unnecessary. -
Sidhartha Miramir The turnaround of BMTC is a result of intense hard work & planning by the mandarins in the transport department (offiicals). A small portion of credit can be given to the transport minister in the previous governemnt & even less to the present transport minister. This is just becoming like Lalu yadav, where instense efforts were put in by the mandarins in the railway ministry & the minister got the credit!
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Ashwin Mahesh The Transport Department per se does not have much to do with BMTC. They share a minister, and probably a small number of offiicials go back and forth. The dept is more focused on vehicle regn, driver licensing, emissions testing, taxation, etc. BMTC's own officials did a lot to make the turnaround possible. That should be the goal in every dept - that 'reform' should result in higher internal capacities too.
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Deepak Vijayvergiy One major thing Ashwin Mahesh, atleast with G2 and G3, I always see either no G2 bus for a longer time and suddenly 2 G buses one after the other. Just stand at Maharaja Signal or Wipro Signal, and you will see the scenario in 30-40 mins max. The reason may be at the last stop, they just step out, play cards together and start again together. But one G3 behind another G3 or max 2-5 mins time difference, you can spot.
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Amit Patel Thanks Ashwin Mahesh for this ........after all your effort we can see change in city........ but saw congress MLA picture or may be transport minister of Karnataka but how we will tell people that you are also part of this
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Ashwin Mahesh I think the people who know, know. That's not important, in any case. Let's just focus on the outcomes we want. The rest will take care of itself.
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Varada Murthy K S Until you come into power, need to keep doing this for others, I guess! if that is real politics, as most say!
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Ashwin Mahesh In any case, BMTC earned its stature, by the work of its officials. There's no reason why they shouldn't carry the flag for achievements. It's only proper.
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Ashwin Prabhu With great support and guidance fromAshwin Mahesh, my colleagues and I at EMBARQ India have been working with BMTC on this project. It's great to see the thoughts and suggestions here and I would like to add some info here
First, the aim of the new BIG Bus Network is to take the original Big10 idea to the logical conclusion and scale - A connective, high-frequency, direction-oriented grid of bus services along all main roads in Bangalore. Prof. Mahesh has already posted the schema of the overall network vision above.
A couple of points first:
a. The BigTrunk is indeed an expansion and scale up of the existing Big10
b. Eventually, there will be high frewuency trunk services on all 12 corridors originating from all 3 major inner city hubs: KBS, KRM (KR Market) and SBS (Shivajinagar)
c. Over time, existing Big10 routes will be absorbed into the BigTrunk brand extending their route in the most appropriate logical manner (i.e. G-3 will be extended to become SBS-3 mainting the current route through Brigade Road etc) -
Ashwin Prabhu 4 more initiatives are planned:
1. Feeder Services: to connect destinations lying off the main road to hubs on the main arterials. (Attached is a concept schematic)
2. Physical Transfer Facilities: Low footprint, low cost transfer terminals at these hubs to enable comfortable 'single facility' transfers between the trunk and feeder services
3. Integrated fares: New fare system for the feeders to ensure no 'transfer penalty'. This will become even easier with the planned introduction of ETMs and Smartcards
4. Unified Branding: There will be a unified branding scheme for all BIG Bus Network buses. Currently, for example, there is no clear link between the Big10, BigCircle/K-Series (white buses with arrows) or BigConnect buses. In the new scheme, there will be enough similarity so that users will know these are all part of one unified, citywide system
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Ashwin Prabhu Almost forgot - here's a route map for the BigTrunk routes along Hosur Road launched today!
(On a side note I think it would be incredibly useful if route maps in general included some visual cue for frequency of service as well)
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Gurumoorthy Mathrubootham Good initiative and frequency is impressive. Any ideas of having such service for Kanakapura/Baneerghata roads?
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Ashwin Mahesh Yes. the idea is that eventually all Big10 roads will get the full complement of trunk and feeder services.
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Ashwin Mahesh eventually we could do that. At least a couple of years before that question becomes important. The current feeders are quite bad.
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Anjum Parwez Hi Ashwin. Thanks alot. You are right. Today launch was another link in the long chain which was started a few years back. I hope in a year we will be able to put at least 5 trunks in operation along with feeder service. As you know it is a costly affair and so need time. But I am confident that it should be possible. Right now we are finalizing the feeder schedule. New Midi buses are going to come in the next two months time. May be by the end of December we will be able to start the feeder service. We need the support of people like you to make this concept popular.
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Ashwin Mahesh BMTC will always have my support. I have a lot of respect and affection for key people who took all this forward, and we owe it to them to make this a model that many other cities can follow. This morning I wrote to senior advisors in the Union government asking them to see how more cities can replicate (with suitable adapts) what we have done here. Please also push in the national state transport corporations assn.
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Naveen Patil Hi Ashwin Sir, I m sure you might have read this but still - http://www.asianage.com/...www.asianage.comBengaluru While the cost of public transport such as the BMTC has seen a sharp rise, an IISc ...
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Comments
what about existing routes?
I just looked up on mybmtc.com and there are atleast 25 different bus routes connecting EC from KBS.
Will all these get cancelled with this introduction of the BIG trunk service?
If they are run together, then its a recepie for failure of the BIG concept. If not immediate stoppage, there needs to be gradual time bound cancellation of the older destination based routing.
We had discussed on how to better utilize TTMCs here
http://praja.in/en/blog/vasanth/2009/09/03/connecting-ttmcs-possible-approach
This would also eliminate the need to travel to CBD to travel to the other part of the city and almost any locality to any locality connectivity.