The buses operated by Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) continue to be the primary mode of public transport for people all across the city. Despite the clamour for more buses, BMTC has been unable to increase the number of buses, to ease the congestion on the roads fuelled by the staggering number of two and four-wheelers. BMTC now operates about 6,800 buses. And now the BMTC which had introduced electric buses might just be considering introducing more such buses through private operators.
According to the Comprehensive Mobility Plan, the BMTC fleet size needs to double in the course of the next three years. Drawing attention to the city’s lack of adequate town planning, Surya Sen, Director (IT) of BMTC, said, “According to the Comprehensive Mobility Plan, proposed by the Directorate of Urban Land Transport (DULT), given the population of the city, there needs to be a bus fleet of 16,000 (by 2031). Right now BMTC has 6,800 buses. Unfortunately, our city isn’t planned in such a way that we can scale up the number of buses, because there is no effective town planning, road infrastructure and bus stops. So right now the goal would be to have at least 10,000 buses.”
To do this, BMTC is now mulling incorporating electric buses under a gross cost contract model with private operators. While BMTC has flirted with the idea of tying up with private operators to run city buses before, the plan never took off. “We are now considering inducting buses through other means like electric buses under contract with private operators. We are already a loss yielding company owing to various external causes such as diesel rates and the salaries we pay our groups. These are variables that aren’t under our control,” Sen said.
The BMTC took a hard hit due to COVID-19 pandemic as well and they are now seeking support from the government to a greater extent, with about 50% of the BMTC’s expenditure being borne by the government for the last two years. “This is why we are trying to induct more electric buses through this gross contract model that we have established. We have a target of setting up around 7,000 buses by the end of the year 2022,” Sen said. BMTC is also planning to boost non-motorised transport (offering better access to public transport and enabling better safety and access to pedestrians and cyclists) in order to enable a shift from private transportation to public transport.
Ravichandar V, a civic evangelist, sheds light on why facilitating public transportation en masse is the need of the hour. “There is an urgent need to double the bus fleet, it is a necessity. We need to think more aggressively because public transport is the future because it is sustainable and environment friendly. If Bengaluru’s traffic issues need to be solved, then what we need are buses which move more people, rather than everyone bringing their private vehicles onto the street. There are countries overseas that have both subsidised and free of cost bus travel to incentivise citizens,” he said.
The economic cost incurred for personal and public transportation respectively, at a city level is drastically different. The investment in doubling the bus fleet at the moment is merely a fraction of what the city is spending on the metro construction, for example. Ravichandar proposed that there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way we conceptualise public transport that goes beyond just doubling the fleets.
Explaining this, he said, “We need mid-size buses and smaller buses, so that on the trunk lines we have the bigger buses moving, while the smaller buses are on the inner circuits. That’s one way to think about it given our current road constraints. Another thing that would alleviate congestion is BMTC outsourcing the management of these buses and getting independent operators with quality control to actually manage the service. We need to empower independent operators to invest and run the buses, this in turn reduces the burden on the system to buy and accommodate the buses and this needs to be a pay per use model instead.”
He added that the digitisation of bus travel was a necessity, since it would not only enable efficiency on part of bus accessibility, but it would also incentivise the buses to take up alternative routes depending on the passengers in the bus.