BRTS: MyBus falters on bottlenecks, frequency

BHOPAL: Bottlenecks in BRTS corridor and inadequate number of buses running in the 24 km-long stretch have made monitoring of buses through global positioning system (GPS) a meaningless exercise. Buses are not punctual and commuters have to wait for long their frequency is 20 to 30 minutes.
Buses get stuck in traffic jams, causing delay. Travelling in MYBus is uncomfortable as ROB work at Habibganj continues, fly-over near GAD crossing is incomplete and cable stay-bridge foundation stone was laid earlier this week.Cable stay-bridge will take at least two years to complete. The GAD crossing flyover is likely to be completed by March 31, 2015 and ROB near Habibganj is likely to take almost one-and-a-half years to complete.
Scheduled frequency of buses in the corridor was four-six minutes when it was planned. However, when it became operational, commuters have to wait for long as their frequency has gone up to 20-30 minutes.
Sanctioned in November 2006, it was inaugurated after delay in September last year. Even when it is completed, the BRTS corridor would only have about 18 km of exclusive corridor. In 6 km, the buses would have to ply in mixed traffic.
GPS was installed on BRTS buses to keep tabs on punctuality, over-speeding and diversion of routes by buses, but passengers regularly rue timing of buses. Punctuality appears to be first casualty.
"They are never punctual. The timing changes every day, the frequency is quite low and one can hardly depend on these buses to reach office," said Rashmi Haldar, a commuter.
CEO of BCCL, PPP Company that runs MYBus, Chandra Mouli Shukla said: "There is an automated system which tracks location of buses through GPS which has three main features. It tracks location and scheduled time of buses. The Passenger Announcement System (PAS) with GPS receiver modules for the bus stop announcement and display of upcoming stop inside the bus and passenger information system (PIS) installed on bus stop to inform passengers regarding bus schedule."
Shukla said, "The traffic congestion and unavailability of adequate buses are main problems why GPS facility can't be exploited."
In all, there are 76 bus stops in BRTS corridor in Bhopal, out of which 22 have PIS. For the rest, work is under progress.
Shukla said, "It will take more than a month to install PIS in remaining bus stops." He said a demand for 200 new buses has been sent to the Centre to improve frequency.
Similarly, recording of CCTV cameras installed in these buses is also not monitored regularly. These cameras were installed to ensure safety of passengers.
Two cameras are installed in each bus to monitor activities of entire day, which is recorded for purpose of future reference in case of any reported incident.
Chandra Mouli Shukla said, "Recorded data of each bus is stored in Digital Video Recorder (DVR) installed in each bus. All bus depots have Wi-fi facility. Once the bus enters inside; the recorded data is transferred automatically into the depot server. Data is managed by software with the help of respective camera IDs, where date-wise collection of data is done with bus and route number. In case of any reported incident, we can always search the CCTV footage with given date and time."
"It is not possible to monitor them on day-to-day basis as there are 205 buses. But, data is copied to the main server from time to time to keep an alternate record. Till date no major incident has been reported to us," he added.