Monorail options: Queue up twice or buy costly pass

Those wanting to travel on the Mumbai Monorail will have to stand in the ticket queue twice. That's because the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) has not yet found a way to have return tickets on city's newest mode of transport, akin to suburban trains. Instead, it is working on coming up with travel passes.

"We are looking at issuing passes. These can be daily, monthly and quarterly. An agency will work to check the traffic patterns and passenger travelling trend for daily and monthly passes," said UPS Madan, metropolitan commissioner. At the same time, he added, daily passes will resolve the problem of a person having to stand twice to buy tokens to travel in either directions.

"Globally, there isn't a system for return journey fare or tokens. With the existing systems including Automatic Fare Collection machines, it's not possible to carry the token a person is travelling on," said Madan.

Similarly, the passenger needs to commence the journey in an hour once the token is issued, thereby making it problematic to issue return journey tokens.

The development authority is running an average of 66 monorail services daily and this is set to increase to 112 services from mid-April, when the operational timings will be increased and made from 6am to 8pm.

Currently, the average operation and maintenance cost of running a single monorail service is close to Rs3,500; thus, a sum of Rs2.31 lakh is being spent daily to keep the latest public transport system on track.

On the other hand, the ticketing revenue is decreasing by the day, with an average of Rs1.2 lakh daily.