Over 4.5m use Mwasalat buses

The average daily number of passengers travelling on buses stood at more than 12,000

MUSCAT: Oman National Transport Company (Mwasalat) transported more than 4.5 million passengers last year.

The figure includes passengers transported from January 1 to December 31, 2017 at all internal lines in the Governorate of Muscat and external lines including various governorates of the Sultanate, a growth by 21 per cent compared to 2016.

The average numbers of passengers transported stood at more than 12,000 passengers per day. The number peaked on Fridays at more than 18,000 passengers.

The average number of Omani passengers during the last survey carried out by Mwasalat in early 2017 reached more than 40 per cent of all passengers in all lines.

Ruwi-Al-Mabella line topped in the number of the passengers on the internal lines in the Governorate of Muscat with more than 1.6 million passengers, followed by the Ruwi-Wadi Al Kabir line with more than 700,000 and Ruwi-Al Amerat line with more than 600,000 passengers. Al KhoudhSultan Qaboos University-Burj Al Sahwa line transported more than 400,000 passengers and Ruwi-Muttrah-Al Alam Palace line got more than 300,000 passengers, while Ruwi-Wadi Adai line transported more than 200,000 passengers. The Al-Mabella Station-Southern Al-Mabella line transported more than 82,000 passengers. Thus, the total number of passengers in the internal lines in the Governorate of Muscat stood at 4,212,189 passengers.

The total number of passengers in the external lines on various governorates of the Sultanate and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) stood at 304,340 passengers. At the end of October 2017, Mwasalat signed a new buses supply agreement for a total of 98 buses, including 33 for external lines and 65 for internal lines, in addition to one for replacing a number of external line buses.