I have written a blog post about overcrowding in Volvo buses here. I am posting the excerpt here, read more on the link. Request your feedback.
Ride comfortness :-
Okay, not everybody gets a seat. But overcrowding the bus and charging premium luxury fares is sheer exploitation. I happened to fight with the MTC crew yesterday (588B – TN01-8609) particularly when the driver was stopping at each stop and asking the people standing by to hop in and the bus would be empty in next couple of stops when it was clearly not the case. Unlike the normal buses, Volvo buses are closed door air conditioned buses. Having 100 people in glass case is not a luxury travel(not even average level of comfort) and getting in and out is like experiencing overcrowding in Mumbai Suburban trains. Overcrowding in closed buses will lead to suffocation as there are no windows and no one cares about safety.It would create a stampede if the bus door gets jammed after an accident. Just because people have the money to pay for the ticket doesn’t mean you have to exploit them. The crew in most cases are greedy.Corporations too. We will get back to reasons / solutions later in the post.
What further surprised me was there was no mention of “capacity” inside the bus. Normal city bus has a capacity of 48+25 and have them written on the front on the bus behind the name board. A B7RLE made by Volvo India has a seating capacity of 40. I today got another shock when i saw 40 straps hanging on the 335E Volvo in Bangalore, which indirectly says the corporation wants 40 people to stand and travel. This is the true face of “comfortable Volvo travel” in India. We as straphangers need to make sure that Volvos are not mumbai suburban trains of our cities.
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Until the Metro starts operations, scenario will be like this.
Srikanth, until Metro starts its operation, scenario will be like this. Metro will take away some amount of crowd from 335E, 500K and 500C routes. It is the BTM commuters who will be the prominent customers then.
Problem is BMTC's demand management is poor. We see empty buses going back to depot as early as 4 PM and late nights, people struggling like you said as in Mumbai Locals.
Initially when the fares increased, demand had decreased. Now, it has reverted back with people taking monthly passes. Somehow it has offloaded lots of vehicles, this is the plus point. Still more buses are needed to meet the demand. Also, non-stop / limited stop buses are also needed to take away the frustation of frequent stopping.
Can private operators fill in this gap with luxury buses to attract the IT crowd? No one has taken up yet.
Volvo services
They need to put a discipline the number of stops. Now they stop anywhere and everywhere to pick up people even in middle of road or at junctions if someone waves hand worse than regular buses. So much so that the trip time gets long.
City Bus Reservations
When we met the then MD of BMTC, Sri. Upendra Tripathy, he was discussing of City Bus Reservations. This concept can solve this problem of overcrowding, uncomfortness, guaranteed seats etc. Something of this concept was used for BIAL bound buses earlier.
Another problem is traffic problem. Now, people take any bus which they see in the bus stop. Because of the traffic problem, schedules may vary from 15-30 minutes and people might start complaining about that. What we need is buses which will fill up fully in the initial stops and run non-stop till stops near last top say till Marathalli for ITPL bound buses and say for example Silkboard Junction for EC bound buses. This is how most company buses operate to manage the schedule.
Metro wont change it!
While metro can take some load on select routes, the problem will remain even then if no action is taken. Bangalore no doubt has been pioneer in introducing monthly passes and it certainly helped offloading vehicles of the road. But the problem here is condition of travelling public in "luxurious" coaches remain pathetic. We may not go into extreme of making the bus non-stop after few stops etc, but just take simple steps such as limit the number of passengers inside the bus(Volvos) at any given point of time. Fix and write the capacity of the bus. When you cant meet the demand, introduce more buses. We all know the current number of buses is not meeting the demand, then we must insist on corporation adding more fleet if when they are projecting Volvo as comfortable means to travel.
Make the route operations dynamic.Why does all the 29 schedules of 335E operate on the same route inspite of having minimal revenues in non peak hours? Can they idle at depots / service lesser connected parts in the non peak hours to prevent revenue loss? If revenue loss is minimized, I dont think crew would be overloading / stopping whenever someone waves hand.