LAHORE – Turkish experts have proposed rescheduling the routes of Metro Bus Service to cope with traffic troubles confronting the passengers standing at the stations in the central parts of the City, sources said.
Sources say that Turkish experts also suggested reserving half of the MBS buses for the purpose and to streamline and improve the service so that city passengers could avail chance of traveling on MBS.
According to the proposal, every second bus will return from the each side of main bus terminals at Gajomata and Shahdra, empty and would lift up passengers from Kalma Chowk at Gajomata side and from Azadi Chowk at Shahdra side.  
Earlier, the experts noticed through computerized e-ticketing system that mostly passengers, residing in central parts of the city while standing at the bus stations were facing problems in finding opportunity of riding in already jam packed buses. According to a data collected from the MBS Authority, as many as 140000 passengers are traveling daily on these buses and number of passengers is increasing rapidly which means authority is earning Rs2.8 million daily.
An engineer of Authority Ozair Shah informed that each bus was plying estimated 384 kilometers’ travel daily. He said that only 30 percent passengers were traveling 27 kilometers from Gajomata to Shahdra and vice versa and according to an estimate, remaining 70 percent passengers were traveling 8 to 9 kilometers.
He said the authority is trying to streamline the system with the help of Turkish engineers and is improving rapidly. He disclosed that the provincial government was buying 45 more buses from Turkey in order to accommodate and facilitating maximum number of passengers and maintaining timing of arrival of buses at bus stations and junctions which although was improving speedily. He said that deal of buying new buses was underway and would take time of about three months.
“Only 90 buses are sufficient for maintaining scheduled time of 3 minutes for each bus to approach every station”, he maintained. He said that the purpose of launching public transport worldwide was to facilitate citizens and not to earn profit and there was no country in the world where the public transport sector is in profit.
The people availing the metro bus facility are welcome to share their experiences at umun79@gmail.com