:)

thats my excuse..however clutch riding in my car, I always envy the volvo riders!

blrsri, so your situation arises because you have to drive up to your nearest bus stand (its far). Or, it could be that the route you want to touch is far away from your house.

ramesh_mbabu - if that option was present, I think all will vote for that one. But some reason has got to be bigger than others. Call it a case of ruthless prioratization!

Well, everyone as a reason to use car or private vehicle. So am I. There is no direct bus to my office. I have to change two. One on the ORR and second from ORR to Bannerghatta road (towards Diary Circle) near Jayadeva. The changing bus stops are too far and there is no proper path to walk between bus stops.

I am not expecting too high fi as volvo, newly introduced Suvarna or our age old Pushpak can do the job for me - but expecting to get the seat (no standing since I also have to carry my laptop on my back just like school kids carrying books!!).

malini As I have said many times on this forum, the BMTC is a total failure and its monopoly must be ended ASAP. It's the failure of the BMTC bus services which has lead to the proliferation of personal vehicles and consequent pollution, accidents and deaths.

The govt must immediately allow private buses to operate un Bangalore.

As discussed and concluded, TTMC model with local shuttles is the ideal solution for BMTC, also the auto connect. This solves the problem of bus stand too far off problem.

Regarding Unclean and Crowded, more Pushpak and Suvarna PHS and possible Volvos need to add on.

Agree that slower than car or bike. But, 15 -30 minutes more should be OK.

TTMC concept that Narayan and others illustrated should be able to connect all the areas to others without going to Majestic / Shivajinagar / Market.

YI Tracking on mobile and Time Schedule PDFs on BMTC website should solve the timings problem.

Interesting to see that only 6 out of 70 votes are for "bus slower than my car/bike". I was expecting this to be in top two. But 70 is too small a sample set to draw big conclusions.

Today I had a eye opening experience. I am in London for some time now and today while in central London, I was contemplating to take the underground train to my home when I suddenly noticed in the bus stand nearby, the bus to a bus-stand near my home was due in 2 minutes. I decided to take the bus then and there. Many of London buses are GPS enabled seemingly.

Realization dawned on me that in Bengaluru, I used to avoid taking a bus many a times since I did not know how long I would have to wait.

GPS systems seem to have become real cheap and even taxi companies like Meru for the Intl airport are using them. Now, if the buses are GPS enabled and their Estimated Time to Arrival are displayed on the bus stops, just imagine what a huge convenience it will be for passengers and this will only invite more bus users.

I remember silkboard once working to organize a meeting with Mr. Tripathy of the BMTC. Did this happen silkboard..?

Bringing in more buses, keeping them clean are all easy to do things. Getting the buses to be more predictable theough GPS will increase ridership and this help reduce the personal vehicle traffic.

Sandeep, to help us understand this better can you dig into that GPS thingie a bit deeper? how pervasive is the system. what all hardware is required? what type of displays are they using LED's, LCD's. what type of predictive software is used? what is the comm infra needed? see if the local dept of transport has any white papers on it. apparently, the saarige has gps hardware, but they are not able to get the communication sorted out. it will be useful to see how london does it. thanks ps: perhaps you folks should organize a praja london meet meet up with asj and our man amongst the brits sha3n.

SB, interesting observation. perhaps a fallout of congestion levels? would'nt it be ironic if turns out that thanks to the jams the playing field is leveled between buses and priv. vehicles! well not really entirely unknown phenomena. these things are dynamic games. the agents will react to each other and any change in environment. say they make sooper dense pubT network. pubT gets congested. roads free up. privT becomes more lucrative. if more people shift to privT, road become congested and pubT becomes more lucrative. things will settle down to some equilibrium. i am guessing 50-50 if really good roads. 60-40 is prolly the norm in most cities of the world. the important point is that roads and privT on them, will always be the primary factor in this equilibrium. roads will never go underutilized. i.e., congestion will never be eliminated. whatever the roads can handle will be occupied. the spill over is what pubT has to run with. and roads and privT on them spill over fast. a pubT network good enough to do 60 is a must. without it the city would collapse.

BMTC has said that it is introducing 200 more volvos in next 9 months. I would say stop it for BIAS. Current buses are enough. Put it for city service.

People travelling to Airport simply cry that there is no frequency .. blah blah blah.. I don't know why too much of concerns of an ocassional flight travel rather than day to day office commute. There are hardly 10% of bangalore population who travel in flight. Why such a huge and wasted investment with 2 or 3 travelling in BIAS volvo buses.

I would like to see these 200 Volvos chugging along the IT areas connecting directly to residential areas without touching Majestic / Market / Shivajinagar.

A service far more advanced than that provided for tracking the London buses (going by Sandeep Keerti's posting), known as "Yelli Iddira?" was in operation for the BMTC's Volvo services for over 6 months. This allowed for tracking buses from anywhere, as compared to having to reach a bus stop in the case of the London service. For those interested, more details are available at
http://www.clinf.com/yi/YI_BMTC/index.html.

The laudable 'objectives' as enumerated on the site were also beginning to be achieved. And, there were a lot more add-on services possible too. But, the BMTC did not attach sufficient value to it, and allowed it to die, because they could not (or did not want to) sort out some minor technical and commercial hitches, inspite of prtests from many regular users, vide
http://www.praja.in/bangalore/blog/namma-nadu/2008/06/09/why-i-gave-bmtc#comment-5467.

And, this one more reason, if there are not enough already, why BMTC's monopoly should go.

And, if Sandeep (alongwith the Praja London chapter) can get London bus services interested in providing the "Yelli Iddira?" service, the site provides the contact particulars. Alternatively, they may contact me.

Muralidhar Rao

If "Yelli Iddira" was already in place looks like we already have BMTC GPS enabled and do not need to go any further!

I looked up the link sent by Murali: http://www.clinf.com/yi/YI_BMTC/index.html and yes, this service seems quite advanced and the clinf folks say it is enabled by GPS!

So we were better than London or Helsinki! Please see links below. But, now we have gone back in time for what ever reason BMTC took to take this service off :-(

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/28/research.transport

Now, if we have all this IT infrastructure in place, we just need to have the real-time information displayed with LED signs at the bus stops to make the picture complete.

I think our next stop should be to lobby BMTC to bring back the "Yelli Iddira" service and also bring in the LED displays at the bus stands.

That apart, the Metro and using our existing rail infrastructure for a suburban train service will still be the dependable public transportation service we all crave for. While these happen, let us lobby BMTC anyway..

I clearly heard someone from BMTC say that they are going for LED signs at Bus stops. They will likely be doing this in phases. I hope its not Vajra routes first and rest later - that will invite chants of elitism etc.

Vasanth - try to understand the reason behind call for high frequency services in BIAS routes. The point is to make the best use of those 60 buses instead of losing money on them by splitting them across 9-10 routes with low frequency. BMTC started a nice thing by targeting the car users with Volvos, this certainly is an okay and practical mid-term strategy to reduce congestion on roads thus helping all, and not just the users of these Vajras.

And I think most if not all of these 200 new Volvos are going to run on regular routes. Actually, I just don't like the distinction between Airport and other Volvos. Just treat BIAL like a TTMC, thats all. Create more TTMCs, and run non stop or limited stop services between TTMCs. Services to BIAL TTMC would need special buses because of this need for luggage racks, thats the only specialty here.