Steep fall in the number of passengers from 47 lakh per day to 28 lakh in the last decade, coupled with the severe financial crisis, has forced the Brihanmumbai Electric Supply Transport Undertaking to and cut flab. As part of its austerity drive, it has proposed curtailing or discarding services on about 150 loss-making routes and to completely scrap its air-conditioned bus services. In July last year the fare was slashed by over 50% too failed to draw in passengers.
It was found that the AC routes failed to recover even 17 % or even less than 15 % of the money spent on them. BEST has also said that higher cost of maintenance of the fleet made it economically not viable to continue with the AC bus services.
The BEST has a fleet of 3,747 of which 3,400 buses ply on 500 routes across the city. Of these, nearly 200 routes earn less than 40% of expense: recovery ratio index. The proposal to scrap these routes, according to BEST, will not inconvenience the three lakh passengers on these routes as they could use alternate transport services or even use their monthly passes to change on to other routes.
BEST has been increasingly facing competition from the Metro, Ola cabs and even share autorickshaws in the city. It feels that changing routes will benefit 21 lakh passengers, who are plying on the profit-making routes as their services would be increased by routing additional buses here.
BEST has also decided to cut late night bus services and restrict the run timings between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. It is also coordinating with transport bodies of Mumbai’s neighbouring districts like Thane, Navi Mumbai and Mira-Bhayander to avoid unhealthy competition, to share resources like bus depots and to streamline and rationalise routes.
The BEST will also have to scrap about 202 buses soon. Recently, when BEST tried to auction old scrapped buses, it found no takers.
