49 new midi buses set to join CTU fleet

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, July 24

Commuters in the city will soon be able to travel on new midi buses, manufactured by Tata. A fleet of 49 new midi buses has already arrived in Chandigarh and will soon be handed over to the Chandigarh Transport Undertaking (CTU) for the city bus service.

The buses are in addition to the 170 AC and non-AC midi buses, manufactured by the SML, that are already running in the local CTU fleet for the past few months.

Besides the midi buses, another fleet of 170 low-floor buses is expected to join the city bus service fleet. Officials in the UT Transport Department said with the arrival of the new buses, there was need for recruiting drivers and conductors to run the fleet.

“The process to recruit 106 drivers and 50 conductors under the recently adopted Punjab Civil Services Rules-2015 has already been initiated. As many as 246 regular drivers and 114 regular conductors had been recruited last year. There was also a proposal to recruit 230 drivers and an equal number of conductors on a contract basis,” said sources.

Under the integrated mass rapid transit system, strengthening of the local bus service is on the key areas of focus.

The process to introduce new simple and easy local routes will be initiated only after the vacancies are filled. Initially, the UT had announced to run buses on horizontal and vertical routes from April 1. In withdrawal from the existing practice of having alphabetic and numerical bus route numbers, numerical numbers from 1 to 31 were planned to be allocated to each route.

The CTU was trying to cater to the increasing demand of commuters from neighbouring urban and sub-urban areas such as Zirakpur, Landran and Kharar.

The process for setting up 235 new bus queue shelters across the city is still pending. A majority of the old bus queue shelters are in need of urgent repairs. On the basis of a field survey, the UT Transport Department had identified new locations, four each around every rotary or traffic junction for the convenience of commuters, where CTU buses would drop and pick up passengers as part of its plan to run the local bus service on new horizontal and vertical routes.

CTU app not user-friendly

Though the city is aiming for the Smart City tag, the CTU mobile-based application, “Chandigarh bus guide”, is not user-friendly. For many destinations, two buses have to be changed, but there are no route plans to guide commuters.