Technology for improved Public Bus Transport

Improving the mobility of vehicles

Serbjeet Kohli: In the case of Pune, one of the things that PMC has invested in and continues to invest in the BRT corridors. Pune being an old city hasn’t got the capacity for an entire dedicated BRT corridor. But wherever possible, especially in the PCMC, Pimpri Chinchwad areas the corporation has found opportunity to insert a dedicated BRT corridor, it has done it. So, here, there is reliability factor. But if the corridor is congested in areas such as Shivaji Nagar and Nanapeth, the core areas of Pune are completely congested. Having the information that your bus is going to spend an extra 20 minutes in the morning allows you as an operator to schedule an extra bus. So, people don’t wait for 45 minutes at the bus stop for the next bus to arrive just because it was assumed that bus will be running every 20 minutes. So technology can help there.

Feedback from Mysore

Yashas Bhargav: The ITS for Mysore was chosen very strategically by World Bank for two basic reasons. One, Mysore is a tourist city and second, Mysore is a very niche city wherein there maybe just 450 to 500 buses. So, the implementation part was supposed to be smooth although there were some glitches in the hardware but the implementation was good.

The project had a separate monitoring and evaluation consultant whose job was basically to do a public opinion survey to understand the gains from ITS. To the advantage of MCTD, they have 96 percent accuracy of schedule adherence of ETA and ETD of what they currently achieve in their PIS boards placed in 200 odd bus stops. So, this actually is helping people there to try to plan their travel, although initially there was hesitance. When I say the success rate of ITS, it is also important to strategically place your passenger information system boards. For example, Mysore is a city which does not boast sarcastically about the traffic compared to Mumbai or Bangalore. So, you have bus stops which are placed at the spacing of say one and a half kilometers across a straight road. So, standing at the second bus stop, you still can see the bus at the first bus stop. Now if you are a commuter or a public and if you can actually see the bus there why would you look at the PIS, you don’t need it.

So, that is where the strategic positioning of a PIS is very important. We have been able to actually identify and tell MCTD to locate PIS only at strategic and important bus stops which have a merger of four or five routes and not at basically at all the bus stops. So, the question which most of them have is why has the ITS failed, because they have PIS possibly everywhere, at all the bus stops. We don’t need it everywhere. You have to put it only where it is required. A PIS also has limitations with respect to display; you might have a single line display, or a two-line display. You can actually even place it at a bus stop having ten routes passing through it every minute. How much is displayed and what is displayed a sort of confuse people. So, that is when you don’t get a good response from people.

What we suggested is not only to have a dynamic display but also to have a kind of a bus stop proposed with solar because power seemed to be a major issue. So, in this public opinion survey, there were a lot of issues with respect to power. We need integration of different departments. We have tried to propose solar bus stops which have both dynamic and also a static route map. The static route map not only gives the arrival information of buses but also helps one plan travel around the radius of say two-three kilometers.

Otherwise the public have been very supportive to the use of ITS in Mysore. There have been negatives initially but now I think slowly the public and even the crew used to it.

When we tried to implement electronic ticketing machines, nobody was ready to use them but today, I think operator goes out of his depot without the ETM.