Don’t miss the bus again

We don’t really know if 10,000 informed citizens of Bengaluru actually parked their cars and two-wheelers at home to take the bus on Bus Day, the 4th of the month.

How much is 10,000 in the estimated 3 million that is supposed to use the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Services (BMTC) every day? That’s 1 in 300 and cynics could be forgiven for saying they didn’t actually spot the difference.

But the pollution statistics that have been released in the media tell a different story. They report a significant fall in parameters from the commencement of Bus Day, confirming the phenomenon with a rise in the pollution numbers at the end of the designated day. If BMTC needs statistical logic to increase the number of buses at the planned rate of 250 every quarter, that should do it.
But if cynics doubt the measurement of pollution levels, we should ask the plain question: What does it mean to have 3 million people using public transport on a daily basis? We could simply say a bus equals an average 50 vehicles, given the average 16km trip with boarding and getting off all along the route. That should do it, we hope.

But, while we are on it, we could ask the worthy Bangaloreans led by praja.in, the concerned citizens’ online initiative, to take a bow. If ever common sense needed help, it is now, and with public transport in this city become stupid, praja and its associates are doing admirable work. From the look of it, even this single Bus Day took months of planning and persuasion. Even if we assume that the statistics were fudged, the good news is that all the parties involved want to do it again on March 4 and next time around I promise I will not miss the bus.

Praja’s own surveys should tell us the full story, but it is amazing that this city of the future is such an enemy of public transport. Why exactly do techies and other worthies like yours truly who earn well, some in millions, a privileged few in billions, suffer commuting for hours on polluted roads back and forth from work? They could easily pool in their brains and kitty cash to hire the best coaches that could shuttle them from their work hubs to the town centre. No sweat.

We know the big excuses: no clear information on bus routes, no direct routes, too few buses or routes and so on. But, surely, it takes the minimum amount of research, possibly one-time, to get the critical information. Custom should make perfect and custom should be good business, too, for BMTC, which could sort out the too-few issues fairly quickly. Now that I use a four-wheeler myself, I must put my neck on the line and confess: I’m too used to being on my own to brush against other people and suffer the sweat. But I ask myself, with so much dirt all around any way, why not a BMTC ride?

My own prediction, and I think a fairly easy one now, is that the Bus Day Project will be a historic success; it will be a model that cities around the world will talk about and probably trigger that make-over for Bangalore that we all dream about. The way people commute changes not only the infrastructure needs of a city, but its social and cultural life. It’s time we got together on this.

Now that we know that we are willing to spend 15% of our life span in jams and slow-moving traffic rather than hop on to a bus, perhaps it is time we tried other ways than trying to persuade individuals to use their common sense or urge us to a common responsibility. Public transport is such a hot idea that it is bewildering that the government — which is even willing, it seems, to privatise air and water — wants to cling on to this stunning monopoly.

Consider this: according to some figures available on the praja.in website, "there are 6,000+ BMTC buses and 91,000 private buses in Bangalore." That’s crazy, I would think. The only possible conclusion here is that there is a leakage here that should please a Swiss bank and that simply proves that there are more people actually using the BMTC than the statistics reveal! So, when BMTC says that there was a 25% jump in their commuter strength along the Bus Day routes, please believe it. Even the traffic police, justifiably given to whining, reported that congestion reduced considerably on Feb 4. So go for it.

One last word: the recession, at least in this part of the world, is over. The IT guys are hiring. The beginners start with two-wheelers, whose numbers have jumped from less than five lakh 20 years ago to over two million now. The auto loan companies are aggressively pushing for business again and the Nano is out. So I tell myself: Take the sweat, go home in peace, faster than the present 5-kmph, and shower. It should help improve our self-respect, at least.