PESHAWAR: The Peshawar High Court has directed the provincial transport department and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Urban Mobility Authority to respond to a petition seeking its orders for the start of a notified feeder route of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) for Peshawar’s cantonment area.

A bench consisting of Justice Mohammad Ibrahim Khan and Justice Abdul Shakoor admitted to full hearing a petition jointly filed by Jamil Akhtar and several other residents concerned against the failure of authorities to launch the BRT feeder route between Peshawar Stadium Chowk in cantonment area to Pishtakhara Chowk on Ring Road.

The schedule for the next hearing will be issued later.

The petitioners requested the court to accept their plea and direct the respondents to ensure the early start of the bus service on the route in question to provide a comfortable mode of transportation to them and thousands of other residents.

PHC asks transport dept, UMA to file response

The respondents in the petition are the provincial government through its chief secretary, secretaries of the communication and works and transport and mass transit departments, managing director of the KP Urban Mobility Authority, and the cantonment executive officer of the Peshawar Cantonment Board.

The counsel for petitioners, Rahat Ali Khan Nahaqi, said the Peshawar BRT was a swift bus transit system, whose one part covered an east-west corridor serving 32 areas on a dedicated track for private buses and the other comprising a network of feeder routes for buses to enter and exit the system to travel on the streets.

He said the Peshawar BRT was inaugurated on Aug 13, 2020, as the fourth such service in the country.

The lawyer said in May 2018, the provincial government had notified the areas within KP as the Mass Transit Areas with an immediate effect for Peshawar’s district as off-corridor feeder.

He argued that while the feeder route from the Stadium Chowk to the Pishtakhara Chowk was mentioned in the notification, the petitioners and other people living along that route awaited its launch.

Mr Nahaqi said the company had been delaying the launching of the feeder route and that the Peshawar Cantonment Board had not been permitting the plying of the BRT buses on cantonment roads.

Meanwhile, three residents of Peshawar’s Warsak Road have filed another petition seeking extension of the BRT feeder route to Warsak Road claiming that a large number of people lived along the road requiring a modern public transport facility.

The petition is filed through lawyers Mohammad Jameel Khan and Saad Rabbani.

The petitioners said on June 7, 2021, the BRT feeder service was inaugurated beginning from Charsadda Road from Peshawar Firdous bus station to the Shah Alam village.

They added that some residents petitioned the court to seek extension of that route up to Naguman area.

The petitioners said the high court had accepted that plea on Oct 13, 2022, and ordered the extension of that feeder route up to Naguman.

They requested the court to order the extension of that route to Warsak Road.

Published in Dawn, April 8th, 2023