A blogpost after a long time.. And what brings me to table now? A relatively mundane issue - City bus travel.
To travel in a city bus in a metro in peak hours is not for the weak hearted. It requires tremendous guts, will power and an indefatigable attitude. Most buses in the popular routes carry passengers at least 2-3 times their originally intended capacities. With a sizeable proportion of passengers travelling on foot-board, One side of the bus leans towards the ground and keeps you guessing, what makes this marvel defy gravity? A few really aged buses in MTC's fleet make it through this dairy chore of ferrying passengers, purely by god's grace. ... And yet these buses (in Chennai) transport over 45 lakh passengers per day, making over Rs. 2 crores collections per day. A truly commendable feat.
Well.. this post is not to douse you all with my woes against the MTC transport. Through my many travels in these buses, I have observed two things which create inconvenience to other passengers and/ or more accidents.
1. Voluntary foot-board travel by many aspiring youths, probably in a bid to showcase their adventurous spirit and woo eligible partners
2. Left side overtaking
My hypothesis is that both these problems can relatively easily be solved if the MTC officials make a small change in the seating arrangement. For historical reasons, the fairer sex takes the left side seats in the MTC buses. If they are instead made to take the right side seats, the following welcome changes can happen:
1. Dis-incentive to voluntarily travel on foot-board due to absence of the right audience/ platform
2. Reckless left hand overtaking for similar reasons described above would stop, as people would be incentiviced to now overtake from the right hand side..
Anybody listening?
3 comments:
Hi Rangarajan,
I am a MTC user and an enthusiast of public transportation, and that explains why this blog caught my notice.
Your idea of women on right side of bus is indeed an out of box idea :-)
I have thought about it and thought that perhaps removing all those grills on windows near the doors might solve the problem.
But how do we take this to MTC? may be write to them or in a regular news paper.
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Not a workable idea. It will make life very difficult for women, because they would have to force themselves through a sea of men in order to get in and out of the bus.
A better solution is to reserve the seats at the front for women and those at the back for men. I think this is the model followed in other states like Kerala. This would still reduce foot board travel because women won't do it at the front, and men don't have an incentive to do it at the back.
The disadvantage is ticket issuance and the only way to solve it is to have two conductors or have a single one moving back and forth often.
Nothing can reduce left-side overtaking because that is related to the general tendency of road users to fill up every available space forward be it on the left or right.
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