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Commuters miss the bus!

Photo: Lingaraj Panda

Crying for attention: Bus stops in Bhubaneswar are used for all but for the purpose they are built as can be seen at Kalpana Square. —

BHUBANESWAR: Beware! If you are coming to the capital city for the first time and waiting to catch a town bus at the designated stop, your travel plan may then go haywire. Bhubaneswar could be the only capital city in the country where town buses don’t stop at their designated places.

Take the example of Kalpana Square. The bus stop is barely 100 metres away from the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) office. Neither town buses nor Puri-bound buses stop at the place. Instead, drivers have turned the small space outside the entrance gate of the State Museum into a bus stop to pick up passengers. The traffic police also seem to approve the act.

Similarly, if a resident of Bhubaneswar is asked to locate the town bus stop at Sahid Nagar, he might have to put in extra efforts to find out the shed.

Situation is somewhat similar with all bus bays along the important routes between Vani Vihar and Master Canteen Square, Acharya Vihar and AG Square, Rasulgarh and Kalpana and Jayadev Vihar and Power House Chhak.

The state of affairs is a result of a host of reasons such as absence of mass public transit system, weak enforcement of traffic rules, lack of civic sense and dilapidated sheds at bus stops.

BMC Commissioner Aparajita Sarangi admits there is virtually no town bus service in the city.

The BMC has abandoned the ownership of operating town buses long ago reportedly due to mounting losses and handed over it to the State Transport Department which has done little to put an effective public transport system in place in the capital city.

Of late, the BMC has come out with a novel idea to convert bus stop sheds in ‘rest shelters’.

“There are some 43 bus shelters in the city. Since all those have been lying unutilised, we have asked a private company Selvel to convert them into rest shelters,” says Ms. Sarangi.

In 2003, the BMC entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with Selvel to this effect but the company did not work on that.

“The plan has been revived recently. In the first phase, renovation of 18 bus shelters will be taken up,” adds Ms. Sarangi.

As per the plan, the company will keep all advertisement rights and be responsible for maintaining the rest shelters.

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