City bus culture yet to sink in Capital

BHUBANESWAR: Popular and ubiquitous city buses are now creating traffic snarls, thanks to inadequate number of bus bays in the Capital. Although city bus service has emerged as the preferred mode of transportation, compared to the autorickshaws, it is creating huge traffic problems with buses halting almost anywhere on the road to pick up passengers. The random halting is posing a huge problem for the traffic. “We have had to book the city buses on numerous such instances under the Odisha Urban Police Act and penalise them,” said Traffic ACP Nirmal Sathpathy. All the city buses in the city, on an average, cover 20 to 25 km in one way. However, one can witness only a few bus bays along Janpath and other major routes of the city but that is the end of it. Even though the city buses started operating only last year, there has been no effort to construct the bays. Many a time, the buses stop midway on request from commuters though it should be the other way round -  the passengers flocking to the stands. The city buses have also been given a stoppage time schedule but since there are no specific, regular stoppages, it mostly goes awry. “It takes too long to reach from one destination to another, more than the time we have. If you need to reach somewhere fast, then you cannot depend on the service,” said Mohini, a management student. The importance of bays is being realised. According to Mayor Ananta Narayan Jena, around 100 bus bays will be constructed across the city. Their locations have been jointly decided by the Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA), BMC, Works Department and the Commissionerate Traffic. The tender for the project has already been issued and the construction will start soon, said Jena. Most of the construction work will be handled by the Works Department and done in phases. Forty bus bays will be constructed in the first phase, the Mayor said.