LAHORE: Plying empty most of the time and seen without passengers every 10 minutes on the 129-kilometre routes in the city, the Metro feeder buses, commonly known as Speedo buses, give an impression of under-utilisation and waste of public money (subsidy) on them.

The officials managing the buses do concede the low usage, but hold two factors responsible for the situation. They insist that all 14 routes, spanning 129km within the city, are well-considered for the density of passengers and some of them have already achieved 70pc of utility.

“Normally, such mass transit plans take three to six months to attain the desired level of efficiency. This service is still not even two months old. Another factor is three-step e-ticketing system and shifting between two bus services. The commuters are still getting used to them. Once both these issues are settled, the service would not look as useless as it is now,” they say.

The commuters, however, have their own issues leading to under-utilisation. “The government has designed the whole service for feeding the Metro Bus across the city,” says Malik Iftikhar, a regular commuter. It makes sense if one has to take the Metro. But using it independent of the Metro is costly; an additional sum of Rs5 if one switches between feeder buses. People thus prefer other modes of travel, where available, if they do not have to land in the Metro Bus service ultimately, he said.“The usefulness of the service is increasing by the day,” claims an official of the Metro Bus Authority. “On the first day, which was March 19, only 10,000 people used it. On May 8, the number was 41,000. The service has attained 70pc of utility factor on three of the 14 routes. On some other routes, the situation is not that good. It is also because the entire service is designed on a different model. Their operation is schedule-based. The bus does not wait for the passengers but leaves within the specific time. It has been designed to provide a credible service that moves on time. It’s considered the only way to make the service dependable enough to replace private vehicles; people knowing they can reach their destinations in time. But despite this model, the buses would soon look fully utilised within next few months because routes are well studied,” he explained.

“We are still not used to keeping cards, scanning them for e-ticketing and re-scanning for refunds,” says Muhammad Jabar from RA Bazaar. Other attractions – like air conditioning, automatic door closing or announcements – hardly matter for common commuter. What matters is the cost of travel. It is successful where it costs less and is not where it does not. That is the bottom line. Nothing else matters for the poor who are supposed to use the Metro Bus Service and these 200 buses feeding them. The government would do better if it could find the way for lowering the cost, as much as it possibly can, to increase the usage, he said.

Published in Dawn, May 12th, 2017