Is HOHO experiment being dropped???

There are proposals and proposals. Of these, there are some the benefits arising from whose implimentation are too obvious for there being any need for further debates. I would have listed BIG-10, and Ho-Ho amongst these.

For all that, if Ho-Ho has supposedly failed, I would attribute the reason to plain and simple sabotage. Sabotage resulting out of the desperation of the coterie to retain its turf from incursions by ABIDe, in the form of Prof Ashwin Mahesh.

The extension of the route to include Shantinagar and KBS stations, adding therewith some twenty minutes to the ride, was the equivalent of striking the last nail onto the Ho-Ho coffin. But, even from the very beginning, it was quite obvious that the coterie was not just not co-operating, but deliberately scuttling the project. The drivers and conductors were kind of trained to be customer-unfriendly; hardly any press ads were released; the coterie was simultaneously working on increasing the ridership in the existing parallel routes, though one would normally have expected them to be discontinued.

There perhaps were a few mistakes committed by Prof Ashwin mahesh also. The targeting of the upper end (car using) customers, with Volvo buses, could perhaps have followed a few months after the basic service using BIG-10 type buses had established itself. And, BIG-10s could have been linked to some three inter-linking Ho-Ho routes (like the sight-seeing routes in London) so that the rides don't take too long.

A suggestion I would like to make additionally, if the service is to be revived, is to make it a single, uniform charge per ride, both for BIG-10 and Ho-Ho, so that with some simple automation, the conductor (and his pilferage) can be eliminated.

The revival of Ho-Ho and sustenance of BIG-10 will actually be test of ABIDE's clout over that of the coterie, and those of the neta's behind them. This is what happens when the service provider is a government agency and a monopoly one at that. As compared to that, if it's with the private sector, the customer alone will be the king.

Muralidhar Rao  

PS: There's a proposal now to stretch the BIG-10 routes to BIG-5. My suggestion would be to take that up as a separate service, if at all, with diffrently coloured buses.