Fort Feri 2- out of the loop

On board Fort Feri No 2 on a quiet Saturday afternoon last week, as I got ready to alight after the Sakhar Bhavan stop, a sudden detour took place and as another passenger and I uttered exclamations of surprise, the bus driver assured us, without taking his eyes off the road of course, that it was the first day of the new route taken by FF No 2, all the way to the doorstep of the NCPA and back, only after which could we alight at the Yeshwantrao Chavan Pratishthan stop. What was the point of this loop, we asked, perhaps it was to make the route more productive by picking up more passengers. No, shrugged the driver, it wasn’t as if this stretch languished for service – Fort Feri No 1, Special No 1, 108 and other buses stop here too, and he went on to suggest that it was a bookreading someone in the BEST ivory tower who had thought up this diversion. We lamented the extra two-three minutes it had added to our commute and wondered why wouldn’t BEST extend at least one of the Fort Feri services all the way up to the end of Free Press Journal Marg because there is no service to and from CST that goes this far – Special No 12 plies for a limited time in the evening hours only, while Churchgate commuters are excellently served by Route No 100. Navigating the traffic is an absolute pain the way things stand now. We wish BEST would let us know about these changes, instead of just springing them upon us like that. In fact, we would be happy to SMS our response to any proposed route change if consulted and then it could be decided by a majority vote of commuters – now that would be truly democratic.

-Sita V Raghavan, Mulund