The Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) has finally woken up to the advantages of operating on trunk and feeder routes instead of its present destination-based system.
It has been a long standing demand of many citizen groups in the city and the transport utility will launch a pilot project next month to explore its feasibility.
Under the destination-based system, many buses head in the same direction towards locations that are near each other. Instead of this method, the BMTC proposes to operate a main trunk route with increased frequency to one location. From there, the feeder buses will take the passengers further to their final destinations.
For example, instead of providing buses to each village, the BMTC will now have trunk routes which will take the passengers to a nearby point. From here, feeder buses will travel towards the villages and provide last mile connectivity.
The pilot project will be initially implemented on three trunk routes, Majestic to Attibele, Majestic to Chandapura and Majestic to Electronics City, said Anjum Parvez, MD, BMTC.
“After the initial routes have been introduced and studied, we shall also start trunk routes from K R Market and Shivajinagar. This will help us reduce operating costs as well as increase the efficiency. We have
further identified 12 more trunk routes like Majestic to Yelahanka and Varthur,” he said.
For the next couple of months, Parvez added that the pilot project will function in parallel with the current destination-based services.
“The feeder buses will begin operations only after three months once people understand how trunk
and feeder services work. BMTC has around 262 schedules operating on 63 routes. Once the new system is in place, the routes will drop to 30 and the frequency will increase almost four times,” he said.
This will take the expected waiting time for a bus in villages to 35 minutes from the present 120 minutes. Along trunk routes, the frequency will be about 0-3 minutes, he added.
Branding is an important part of the process, said Parvez, so that people are able to identify buses easily. While the design of the bus will be similar to the Big 10 buses, the BMTC is also working on changing the numbering system of buses, so that commuters are able to identify buses easily. Buses operating along trunk routes will have numbering such as KBS (Origin) 3 (Trunk route number) and E (Electronics City).
Shifting to the trunk and feeder services will also mean that the fare system of BMTC needs to be revised. Now, BMTC’s fare system is designed in such a way that commuters have to pay more at the start of a journey and the fare decreases as stages and distance (one stage is about 2 km) increases. This means that commuters will have to pay more when shifting from trunk to feeder buses.
“In order to prevent this, we will decide a fixed price for feeder buses until the electronic ticketing machines (ETMs) are in place,” he said.
The success of the pilot will be determined based a survey which will be done on the ground, said Parvez.
He said he expects that it will take passengers about eight months to adapt to the new system. “During this time, we will work on other trunk and feeder routes in the city,” he said.