The long-overdue project to rationalise bus routes in the Greater Kochi area in order to ensure availability of public-transport buses at regular intervals along different routes, has run into rough weather.
The project that was spearheaded by, among others, Kochi Corporation, was to be implemented by Kochi Metropolitan Transport Authority (KMTA) since the authority has legislative backing. The route-rationalisation plan was to cover existing bus routes and an additional 42 residential and commercial areas that had little or no public transport.
Tens of thousands of commuters in the city and its suburbs had, over the years, been forced to depend on private vehicles, autorickshaws, and taxi cars to reach their destination — the net result of the delay in rationalising bus routes in order to bring about a win-win situation for commuters and bus operators. This was apart from problems such as the overlapping/bunching of bus schedules along arterial roads leading to reckless driving by bus operators to get maximum number of commuters.
Over a year ago, Systra Consortium, a French transport-planning agency, had readied a preliminary report on rationalising bus routes in areas under Kochi Corporation and municipalities in its suburbs. This was in turn approved by AFD, a French lending agency that gave a soft loan for Kochi Metro’s first phase. The second phase of the project and its implementation are yet to kick off.
Official sources said that Systra Consortium put in considerable effort to collect data, map bus routes and bus stops, and identify corridors that had nil or inadequate public transport, in a bid to lessen reliance on private vehicles that were worsening congestion and parking problems in the city and suburban towns. “The study shed light on aspects such as the considerable demand for public-transport buses from densely populated areas like West Kochi. With most side roads in the region being too narrow to host conventional 12-metre-long buses, public-transport experts suggested the need to operate mini-buses in such routes.”
Bus operators from the city and those that operated from Goshree islands to the city decried the delay in rolling out the final bus-route-rationalisation plan. They hoped that at least a section of the operators would be willing to operate trips through Stadium Link Road, Panampilly Nagar Avenue, Thammanam-Pullepady Road that is awaiting four-laning, Mattancherry BOT Bridge-Kundannoor Junction corridor and Container Road, where public transport buses either do not operate or have few services.
Expressing concern at over 100 of the total 650 private buses that operated in the city withdrawing from service in the wake of the pandemic, a senior MVD official cited the urgent need to augment the number of private and KSRTC buses and to ready a scientific schedule for their operations, based on the route-rationalisation report.
