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?
