Buses take up over
90% of the public transport in Indian cities. To entice people to make use of public transport, the facilities and services offered by the public transport authorities should be improved. In this context, the need to compare and analyse the performance and statistics of the major bus operators in metro cities becomes essential.
Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation(BMTC), followed by Delhi Transport Corporation(DTC operates the maximum number of buses in India.
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| Bus fleet strength of bus operators in major metros |
Chennai (MTC) has the lowest number of buses among the four major metros.
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| Daily distance covered by the buses in a day(in lakhs) |
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| Staff per bus |
BMTC has average of 5.2 employees per bus. Comparatively, 6.47 employees per bus. Obviously, MTC has invested unnecessarily in an ineffective workforce, since BMTC is able to operate efficiently with its ratio. MTC needs to improve employee efficiency and also increase the number of buses in its fleet.
An Analysis of MTC
As visible from below graph, MTC's fleet strength has been increasing year over year, even if at a slower pace than other bus operators.
Even as the fleet strength is increasing, some mysterious impairment is causing the distance covered by a bus per day and the passengers transported per day to decrease to 2008 levels.
One would normally expect the passengers carried per day and the distance covered per day will increase when the bus fleet strength increases.
Potential reasons could be,
1. Mismanagement of resources
2. Heavy increase in traffic impeding bus operations
3. Dominance of share autos
4. Increased ticket fares
(3 & 4 updated, thanks to comment from saratchandra kakarla)
Whatever be the reason for the downfall, it is in the best interests of the people that the MTC should find the source of problem and address it to provide a better service to the country.
Nevertheless, it is a good initiative that the Chennai and Bangalore bus operators have published their performance details on their websites.
MTC Performance
BMTC Performance
It would be beneficial if other bus operators too published their performance details.
