The traffic congestion is forcing BEST to operate lesser buses on road.
What do we lose if a BEST bus is stranded in traffic in the city? Over 5,000 bus trips which otherwise could ferry more passengers and Rs 50-60 lakh per day of public money. This is the state of affairs that the mind-numbing traffic jams have led to.
This problem is leading to drop in passenger count which has touched 25 lakh now. The traffic congestion is forcing BEST to operate lesser buses on road. The total fleet of 3,337 buses - of which around 300 odd buses are kept for maintenance and repairs - have to run 5 lakh kilometere everyday.
"However due to traffic congestion on road around 10 per cent of them do not complete the required number of trips," said a BEST official. This means that around 50,000 kilometre of bus trips are left incomplete everyday.
Ideally each bus needs to complete 200 kms per day but they manage only 160-170kms. The rest of the loss is due to the traffic on road. All this has severe repercussions on people's time and money. The average wait time is close to 15-20 minutes at any bus stop.
The BEST fleet is scheduled to run around 60000 trips but operates around 50000 or so trips each day. Even out of this much, 10 percent of it is lost in traffic jams due to which people do not get buses on time.
When we talk about public money, due to traffic jams the BEST is losing of fuel cost, manpower and other expenditures on buses. As per rough calculations, this leads to wastage of huge Rs 50-55 lakh per day.
The BEST, meanwhile is claiming that they have started working on allowing people to gauge the expected time of arrival of buses. "By December we are sure that people will have an app that will allow to check the ETA of buses, its exact location and nearest bus stop where a particular bus route number will halt," said Surendra Bagde, General Manager, BEST Undertaking.
At present, trials are on at Wadala and Backbay bus depots on the same which began in March. They have already installed GPS system in 250 plus buses for the same.
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