NICOSIA BUSES: GPS tracking and ticket machines

The public bus services are now efficient, attitudes have changed, but unfortunately there are not many passengers. Why is that?

“The buses was the first area I touched when I took over at the Ministry. We have a 3-year plan and it was a bit of a mess. There were a lot of disputes and we created a specialised team to deal with the buses and we resolved a lot of the conflicts.

“The other thing we did , we passed the proposal for the introduction of the GPS system, and the system for automatic cancelling of tickets, or smart ticketing. That tender has already finished and we will start implementing the new system in 2015. We will know where every bus is and at every stop passengers will know when the next bus arrives. It will be done gradually. Smart ticketing will also allow us to do many things that now we cannot do. We will be able to improve the service to the customers and also improve the route. As regards the absence of ‘cyclical’ routes, it is true that buses only serve direct routes and not across town. We have just finished a major exercise of optimising the bus network.

“We have also taken the decision to bring in new buses, so we have started the process of purchasing or hiring, like a request for interest, to introduce a number of new small buses, and especially to replace the ones in Larnaca and Limassol where we have a lot of old buses.”