The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : More commuters and less buses

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jan 02, 2007
ePaper

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

More commuters and less buses

Special Correspondent

CHENNAI: Hundreds of commuters across central and south Chennai were put to great difficulty especially those returning home, on Monday evening, as there were not enough MTC buses on the road.

While commuters complained that they had to wait for nearly one hour in areas such as Kamarajar Salai, Guindy, Purasawakkam and Egmore, MTC officials said they experienced bus shortage owing to unprecedented holiday crowds in these areas.

The Managing Director of MTC, R. Balasubramanian, when contacted, told The Hindu , that Monday being a public holiday, only lesser number of buses were on the road.

Unprecedented

"We operated as per the holiday schedule and suddenly we found that there were unprecedented crowds in areas such as Vandalur Zoo, Besant Nagar and on the Beach (Kamarajar) Road. We saw the swelling crowds and we immediately made arrangement to run more single trips using the available crew by providing additional wages for them. Most of the holiday crowd was cleared by 8-45 p.m," he added.

Around 8 p.m. areas such as Egmore and Puraswakkam as also the Beach Road saw huge crowds of commuters spilling on from the sidewalks on the road waiting for buses.

Even those buses that came in were fully packed.

When the `holiday schedule' is operated about 25 per cent of the normally operated fleet is on the road.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Tamil Nadu