Carpool, car-free fail to ease snarls

Hardly any increase in number RTC buses in Cyberabad

For quite sometime now, IT companies have been encouraging people to car pool or follow car-free days, but there is hardly any increase in public transport facilities like RTC buses in Cyberabad. Most techies continue to travel in cars, which is choking the roads in the area.

In their defence, RTC officials said, at a time when the Metro Rail construction was going on, adding new buses would only increase the traffic.

When the car-free Thursday idea was implemented previously, several techies had opted for public transport. Huge congestion was witnessed on Friday as several cars were plying on the road and the diversions for Metro activity only added to the chaos.

Cyberabad traffic police had to retract the diversions implemented temporarily, to allow the flow of traffic. A senior RTC official said, “Adding more number of buses in Hitec City will add to the congestion. As of now, we are going to study two major routes 127 and 10H. There is a cancellation of almost 10 per cent there due to heavy traffic. We need to revise for peak time traffic.”

However, experts said that in the western part of the city, buses do not go into residential areas. Transport Researcher G.S.R. Chaitanya said, “There is a need to rework on the network of buses in the city. Several new places in the eastern part of the city and many interiors of the western part are not connected.”

The official said that the numbers of buses in the area are around 132-150. He said that a detailed study of all the buses leading to the IT corridor where there is a requirement and demand will be taken into consideration.

An expert said, “ShareAutos and cabs thrive in the western side because there is a dearth of public transport. Instead of focussing on whether it would be profitable for RTC or not, the corporation should focus on serving people better. It should not try to compete with any other transportation service and should run as a public service.”