The Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport (BEST) undertaking will soon rationalise a few bus routes so that they ‘merge’ with others and thus can help commuters change buses easier, reports Shashank Rao for the Free Press Journal.
Under this new hub and spoke model, bus routes will converge at key areas, allowing for streamlined traffic and better changeovers for passengers. In order to implement this plan, the undertaking will require 4,852 buses. It currently has only 3,242.
What all does the plan entail?
The plan involves five nodal points each in the island city and Western suburbs and four in the Eastern suburbs. They are Colaba, Backbay, Worli, Mahim and Dadar in the south, Bandra, Santacruz, Goregaon, Dindoshi and Dahisar in the West and Sion, Mulund, Anushakti Nagar and Ghatkopar in the East. Different routes will converge at these nodal points, allowing passengers to seamlessly change routes.
Further, bus operations will be divided into five corridors. There is a main corridor, a sub-corridor, an east-west corridor and rail-feeder corridor. The last one will also see an expansion once Metro Lines 2 and 7 are operational.
What is the hub and spoke model?
The hub and spoke model, as opposed to the point-to-point model is where a certain geographical region has a point that acts as a hub. Multiple routes converge at the hub , thus allowing an exchange of passengers from one route to another. The model is heavily used in aviation where flights along lesser served routes arrive at a hub and passengers then transfer to another flight.
In the current context, an example of the hub and spoke model (partially) would be people taking the suburban line to either Andheri or Ghatkopar and then boarding the Metro Line 1.
BEST’s plan to go for a hub and spoke model would augur well for commuters.
Featured Image: Buses parked at Agarkar Chowk in 2018, viewed from the skywalk by Srikanth Ramakrishnan
Problem is, local train services have not been completely restarted and metro has just 1 operational line.
Frequency of buses has become so poor that a person would prefer a direct bus rather than a changeover.
At least till the things are not normalised, and till more number of buses are actually deployed by BEST, it should have sticked to the older routes which people were used to.