Bus pooling: IT companies have their way

The Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) providing buses for  companies to drop their staff is nothing new. But, in an initiative to encourage bus pooling, it has launched a bus sharing service in IT parks in the city, where employees can design the route the bus should take to reach their destinations.

BMTC will only provide buses and monthly passes while an external agency will manage routes and operations. Encouraged by enthusiastic response, in two months since the initiative has begun, the corporation has provided 65 buses to tech parks such as Global Village, RMZ, AMD and Brigade Metropolis. Talks are on to lure other companies to use the bus pooling, according to Dileep Sathya of Indium Projects, the agency that manages the services.

“A number of reasons inspired this idea,” Sathya said. “As Bangalore is an IT hub, there are lots of IT employees in the city. With more IT companies moving to the city, the number of vehicles and people on the road is bound to increase. Besides, employees can save more than 40% of what they usually spend on private vehicles or cabs,” he said. “Companies do not have to pay anything from their pockets for this. Moreover, they can be reasonably assured that their employees get to work and reach home safely.

Each employee only needs to pay `100 to the agency, in addition to buying the monthly pass. Even if someone misses a bus, he/she can take any other BMTC bus to get to work or reach home as monthly passes are valid in all BMTC buses,” Sathya said. Employees can also be assured of reliability of services, which is often cited as a drawback of regular BMTC services, he added. “With these services, the number of employees using private vehicles has come down,” Sathya said.

“As the initiative caters to IT parks with a number of companies under one roof, even smaller firms can benefit, as they usually do not have adequate number of employees to hire a full bus.” BMTC also benefits from this. “We can be sure of a regular number of passengers per month and this will give us an assured income,” said a BMTC official.

However, there are some limitations. BMTC will allow a bus to run only if all the 41 seats are filled. Providing services during night is another issue. “Though we have better connectivity as routes are designed to make the journey comfortable for commuters, we are unable to drop all the employees at their door steps due to infrastructure problems,” said Sathya.

With the response that the initiative has elicited, BMTC plans to provide 20 more buses from a new fleet of buses it will be adding for the service by March end.