BENGALURU:Though it won multiple awards for being technologically advanced, the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) website has been dysfunctional for two to three months. “We have been checking the site and found it to be continuously out of order for the past two to three months. While the homepage opens, other services listed do not work. For example, we wanted to use the website for gathering data on schedules cancelled, performance indicators and bus routes, which we have not been able to use for a long time,” says Vinay Sreenivasa, member of Bengaluru Bus Prayanikara Vedike (passengers association).
“The trip planner feature, which is useful to commuters, has not been working properly for four weeks. How do we find out about new routes and bus counts if the site does not work? Moreover, I track the passenger count on a regular basis as numbers tell us a lot of things about the service,” says Srinivas Alavilli, member of NGO Citizens for Bengaluru. He adds, “Crores are spent on Intelligent Transport System, but the website itself does not work.”
While some sections such as recruitment and student passes were found to be working, other sections such as BMTC at a glance, trip planner, need more buses, did not display the information. Nagendra, chief systems manager of BMTC tells CE, “We notice the website has been hanging for a few months now due to excessive traffic. This happened when we first announced student passes and opened for recruitment. We got about three lakh visitors checking the site for student bus passes and 80,000 for the recruitment drive, which caused some links to hang.”
“Ten days ago, we disabled some of the categories to fix technical issues. We are updating the software and expanding it to make sure it does not hang due to excess traffic. It will be fixed within a day,” Nagendra claims.