Karnataka - Mysore   

Survey under way to identify new bus routes

— PHOTO: M.A. SRIRAM

Need for a facelift: The unsystematic layout of bus stations only serve to highlight that improvements to the public transport system is imperative.

MYSORE: The rapid urbanisation of Mysore has resulted in the demand for an effective public transport system with useful amenities for commuters. The improvement of public transport system which would provide efficient, economic and speedy transportation has become the need of the hour to decongest roads and discourage personalised transport.

Accordingly, the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) has proposed to improve its intra-city services. With the sprouting up of many residential layouts, the corporation has chalked out an action plan to streamline its city services according to the needs of the increasing population.

As a first step, the corporation has proposed to introduce more buses to the newly-carved layouts.

“A survey has been taken up to identify new routes and potential areas for introducing additional services,” said M.N. Srinivas, Divisional Controller (Urban), KSRTC, Mysore. He told The Hindu that commuter movement is not encouraging in certain existing routes.

“We are identifying such routes to rationalise the services. Services on such routes will be reduced and more buses will ply on the routes where the commuter load is high,” said Mr. Srinivas. The Divisional Controller observed that the corporation would incur losses if it continued to run services according to the current schedule prepared some years ago.

“It costs Rs. 21 a km for running the service. If there is no commuter load, we shall incur loss. We are conducting the survey to identify potential routes for streamlining the services. The bus timings of some routes may be rescheduled after the survey,” Mr. Srinivas said.

Following the proposal to increase the number of buses for intra-city services, the process of appointing drivers and conductors has begun and the entire process of streamlining the services will be completed by the end of October, he said.

“The corporation has about 1,500 drivers and conductors for operating the city services, including spare drivers and conductors,” he said. The corporation is developing the Intelligent Transport System (ITS) to make travel easier and convenient for the passengers. Under this system, passenger information system (PIS) using Global Positioning System (GPS) and Geographical Information System would be introduced.

“With these technologies, movement of buses will be tracked and information on their arrival at the stops will be fed to the information system, which, in turn, will be displayed on the electronic display systems put up at the respective stops.

The entire fleet of buses deployed for city services in Mysore would be enabled with GPS. This would reduce waiting time at bus stops since the arrival time of the buses to particular stops would be displayed and updated en route,” said sources in KSRTC.

After Bangalore, Mysore is the second city where the hi-tech passenger information system has been proposed, they said.

Besides, the Rs. 108-crore Transport Master Plan for the city has been cleared under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and the works are slated to commence next month. This was revealed by Minister for Transport R. Ashok, who was here on Monday.

Besides modernisation of the city bus-station (CBS) and mofussil bus-stations (MBS), the transport plan includes construction of hi-tech bus terminuses — Inter-Model Transport Facility (IMTC) — at five locations to improve the city transport services. The IMTCs will come up along the proposed Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) corridor.

The KSRTC has prepared the master plan to improve the city’s transport infrastructure. The first phase of the work will be upgrading CBS and MBS, and construction of IMTCs and Passenger Amenities Centres (PACs) at Sathagalli and Kuvempunagar, IMTCs at R.S. Naidunagar and Yelwal, and Passenger and Tourist Amenities Centre (TAC) atop Chamundi Hills, in addition to construction of modern and heritage-type bus shelters here. “These works may discourage personalised transport and strengthen public transport system,” said the KSRTC officials hopefully.

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