More commuters in the a/c MTC buses in Chennai - More SETC a/c buses from Chennai to Trichy, Salem etc now!!
Posted on: 18/May/2022 9:52:52 AM
There is now a huge demand for the air-conditioned buses due to the peak summer season. As a result, SETC or State Express Transport Corporation has increased the bus services along Chennai- Trichy and Chennai- Salem routes now.
Normally, SETC would operate 210 buses on the weekdays but on Sunday it operated more than 310 bus services. This was according to official data from SETC. There was a 35% shortage of bus crew and despite this issue the SETC was able to transport more than 15000 passengers on Sunday.
A senior officer belonging to SETC explained about how due to summer vacations most trains have been running full and the passengers could know about their tatkal status very late only. There have been more last minute bookings in SETC now due to the above said reason. Information collected is that the last minute SETC bus bookings increased to 10000 bookings per day. He added that on the working days the last minute bookings were 5000 per day.
The air-conditioned MTC buses in Chennai have been running full now due to this peak summer heat. This inspite of high ticket rates in these buses from Rs 15 to Rs 80. In the deluxe buses Rs 11 to Rs 49 is the ticket fare. There are about 30lakhs of regular commuters for MTC buses in Chennai out of a total of 90 lakhs population in the city. There are just 48 MTC buses now that are air-conditioned.
Despite the huge demand for air-conditioned MTC buses in Chennai, there are not enough buses and this has been highly disappointing. This was as per an activist Mr. R. Rengachari. He then shed light on how the new BS- 6 compliant and battery operated electric buses would not be hitting the roads anytime soon.
A regular SETC bus commuter later mentioned that in the existing a/c buses the air-conditioners become faulty often and gas levels doesn’t get checked often. He added that the dust in the a/c vents were not cleaned properly too. Fact is that for more than 2 years now most air-conditioned buses have not been operated and this was as per an official from SETC.
