Sharing wheels

Sharing wheels


Pic: Aniruddha Chowdhury.
Eshwar Sundaresan
22 Sep 2008 03:41:00 AM IST

SO the BMTC’s ploy to offer one-rupee rides to all passengers on its fleet of Volvos has backfired. Reports of vandalism –- seats damaged, surfaces scribbled upon etc -– point to the obvious fact that the have-nots have had three field days and returned to their daily, shall we say, daily fares. Perhaps not many from the target audience -– the upwardly mobile Bangaloreans with two plus four wheels in the garage –- actually availed the scheme. And the century old formula –- more wheels equals more success -– will apply in the foreseeable future.

Despite this failure, the BMTC must be lauded for making the attempt to expand is customer base and decongesting the roads.And it was a good idea as well -– the Volvo buses, with their luxury quotients, are ideally suited to lure even the snobs into public transportation, perhaps even make him admit, “Hey, this isn’t half as bad as fuming and greying within jams.” Perhaps similar attempts in the future will work, provided the BMTC solves what is becoming known as the Last Mile Hitch. As the term suggests, the Last Mile Hitch reflects the BMTC’s inability to provide viable connectivity between two random points in the city -– despite taking the second bus, the commuter often ends up short of his destination, and he has no choice but to leg it or catch an auto rickshaw, which, of course, is a far more expensive option than the Volvo bus! Well, maybe the auto is still the answer to the Last Mile Hitch – a shared auto, that is. Every Tier II and Tier III city in India, plus Kolkata and suburban Delhi -– practise the shared auto model to telling effect. With the auto transformed into a virtual bus service, with fixed routes and fares to match, commuters wouldn’t have to think twice before leaving their wheels to piss air in their garages.

Needless to say, to allow this model to function, auto drivers in the city will have to change their mindset. Instead of making ten premium trips a day, they’ll have to ply more. And make more money and fewer arguments in the bargain.

Not bad, as whacky ideas go, huh? Maybe the more earnest auto drivers would be interested.

Reminds me of Rashid bhai, who ferried me to the nearest bus stop the other day. Rashid bhai has recently returned to Bangalore to be close to his ailing mother and is finding the Bangalore auto driver to be as strange as the Mariana microbe. ‘Won’t go here, won’t go there.

Give me double, give me triple. What a bunch of wastrels,’ he said, shaking his head. Rashid bhai, you see, was an auto driver in Mumbai as well, and therefore a de facto ambassador of the city, neither intimidated by nor intimidating towards his passenger.

Auto rickshaw drivers in Bangalore have an important lesson to learn from Rashid bhai -– once his middle-class clientele have the Namma Metro at his disposal, there will be fewer fares in the offing. So they need to reinvent. Now.

And the shared auto model offers a way out of frustration and extinction.

Meanwhile,we, as individual citizens, can always operate mini shared auto models by ourselves. Try it out the next time you’re awaiting a bus. It works.

By Eshwar Sundaresan The writer is a full-time writer and author of Bangalored: The Expat Story. This column is on things about Bangalore that gel, things that jar and everything in between eshwars@vsnl.net