BEST discontinues superfast bus services

Citing low commuter response, BEST has discontinued two superfast bus services, including the South Mumbai-Airport transfer. However, activists have blamed it on insufficient effort by the company to publicise the routes.

The Corridor services, which ran almost parallel to the suburban railway network, provided superfast connectivity to commuters who had to journey between the island city and suburbs, or between two distant parts of the eastern and western suburbs quickly. AC corridor bus was available every 15-20 minutes on select bus stops, and travelled only on the arterial roads or flyovers.

The SoBo-Airport service was launched in August 2010 as part of BEST’s 14 exclusive Corridor services. It operated on Corridor 1 and was thus referred to as C1. C1 has now been withdrawn, along with another Corridor service (C2) which connected Colaba with Shivaji Nagar. These changes were made during the BEST transport wing’s recent route revision, which came into effect from late 2011.

Activist AV Shenoy wrote to BEST, arguing for the need to better publicise the concept as it was commuter-friendly. “I have been an ardent user of arterial express routes C1 and C2, and found them to be extremely useful. No doubt it was observed that these two routes were running below capacity. However, I feel that BEST has not taken sufficient efforts to popularise the same. BEST should reconsider this decision,” wrote Shenoy.

A senior BEST official denied that insufficient publicity was to blame for poor commuter response, and cited the good performance of other corridor routes as evidence.

“We began this experiment about a year ago. Since C1 went via Worli instead of Dadar, where buses get the advantage of at least three flyovers, a major speed advantage was denied to these commuters. This explains the low commuter response. We have discontinued it for the moment... and we expect to be able to bring this route again into consideration,” the official said.