Only one,000 buses for 75 lakh Amdavadis! | Ahmedabad Information

AHMEDABAD: In Ahmedabad, the symphony of public transport will get drowned out by the cacophony of personal autos. Whereas the town’s inhabitants has greater than doubled from 35 lakh in 1990 to 78 lakh in 2024, the variety of buses serving this rising populace has barely inched ahead — from 931 to simply over 1,000.
This mathematical mismatch is however one symptom of the illness afflicting the town’s transit system.A senior official from the AMC, talking on situation of anonymity, painted an image of a metropolis grappling with its personal development.
“We’ve expanded from 196 sq km to over 486 sq km between early 2000 and now. And but our public transport has not stored tempo with it.”
The numbers inform a sobering story. Whereas the Centre’s service-level benchmark recommends 60 buses per 1 lakh residents — which implies 4,800 buses for Ahmedabad — the town has barely 1 / 4 of that quantity. Evaluate this to Bengaluru, the place 6,700 buses serve 1.1 crore individuals, and the shortfall turns into manifestly obvious.
The BRTS, launched with a lot fanfare in 2009, was meant to vary individuals’s notion of public transport. With air-conditioned buses arriving each two minutes and fares that don’t break the financial institution, it appeared that folks would take to a brand new site visitors tradition with ease.
“Mere fanfare is inadequate. Managing transportation operations is a large activity. How a lot does AMC contribute to enhancing our public transport community? Whereas BRTS working prices are Rs 65-70 per bus/ km, that of AMTS is Rs 125. Now we have pensions and salaries for AMTS whereas BRTS hires staff on contract for less expensive,” the AMC official stated.
Ridership stays stubbornly low in each networks. The official defined, “We will’t appear to rebuild the behavior of bus journey. As two wheelers proceed to develop and dominate the streets — a development that has seen accident fatalities spike from 105 in 2005 to 535 at present — the necessity for a sturdy public transport system has by no means been extra pressing.”