Month: July 2025

Orbit Wallet Wins STAMP Challenge, We Might See BMTC Rollout Of NCMC Soon

In an interesting development, Orbit Wallet (Sakaera Technologies) won part of a $100,000 (₹86 lakh) as part of the Station Access and Mobility Programme (STAMP) Challenge : Nudging Commuter Behaviour organised by the Toyota Mobility Foundation, Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), Bengaluru Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL), WRI Foundation, and Electronics City Industrial Association (ELCIA).

As per a LinkedIn post by Orbit’s CEO Harshvardhan Zaveri, the pilot programme is to start in August 2025 with tie-ups with companies in Electronics City to issue Orbit Wallet’s Prepaid Card to promote patronage of the National Common Mobility Card (NCMC). The other three winners of the STAMP Challenge, according to a Deccan Herald article are CommuteVerse, Nippon Koei Business Ventures and Tummoc (Transhelp Technologies). Under STAMP 2025, the winners will use demonstrate the integration of behavioural patterns with public transport.

The Orbit Wallet, an NCMC-enabled RuPay Prepaid Card

While the timing and location of Orbit’s announcement coincides with the opening of Namma Metro’s Yellow Line that will connect Electronics City with the rest of Bengaluru, we hope that it will also translate towards the BMTC accepting the NCMC as a payment method. BMTC had in May 2025 announced that it was looking at upgrading its ticketing systems to accept the NCMC. A year prior to that, it was reported by Christin Mathew Philip of MoneyControl that BMTC with a daily ridership of 38 lakh was not keen on accepting the Namma Metro NCMC because BMRCL had a ridership of 7-8 lakh, an argument that defies logic and defeats the purpose of the NCMC itself.

Let’s hope that BMTC will take the smart step and roll-out the red carpet for the NCMC soon.

Notes: Nippon Koei is a Japanese consultancy firm that works in the transport sector. It has worked with the Chennai Metro Rail Limited (CMRL) in the past.
Tummoc is the platform that allows commuters to track BMTC buses and also purchase daily passes. In Delhi, commuters can buy bus tickets as well with Tummoc.

I couldn’t find much about CommuteVerse but this LinkedIn post by Dr Aekta Aggarwal, Associate Professor at IIM Indore sheds some light on it. She describes it as a behaviourly intelligent commuting platform. I will post more once I learn more about it.

Featured Image: Winners of the STAMP Mobility Challenge (Picture via Toyota Mobility Foundation)

Ten Years Of This Blog: Some Thoughts And Reflections

Around a decade ago, I encountered a severe crisis in my life. I had too much time on my hands. I had taken a backseat from actively editing the English Wikipedia, and a certain other setback in my life left me with a lot of time on my hands and I was floundering as to what to do with my time. I had just returned from an internship at a magazine (which was then using WordPress for their website) and decided I wanted to do something real with WordPress this time. I had a blog on Google’s Blogger for a decade – interestingly started in July – and well, 13-year old me was a stark contrast to 23-year old me, which is to say that 33-year old me is another story, but that’s for another day. The one thing that has stuck without any change all this while however, is my love for public transport, especially buses. In fact, the earliest news story that I can remember is of an MTC (then Pallavan) bus falling off the Ekkatuthangal bridge into the Adayar river when we lived in Chennai.

Eventually, I realised that it was high time I stopped experimenting with WordPress on XAMPP and took a split-second decision, one which I was scared that I’d regret someday. I wanted full control over my blog, and I decided to buy a domain and hosting. And thus, BESTpedia was born.

But why BESTpedia? Well it had to do with buses, and it had to do with BEST, and the lingering hangover of Wikipedia was still there. This is the ‘official version’. The real reason will remain a secret for long time.

I chose to pick a written blog over a video or any other medium, because I loved to write. I did want to start a podcast, I was good with audio editing, I even got myself a Blue Snowball iCE microphone (thanks Arun!), but then podcasts got ruined by people showing their faces on YouTube. Oh and in case you guys did miss it, I did end up being on a podcast, hosted by my namesake in 2023. You can watch it (I know, I know) here. That being said, I have been told on many an occasion that I have a face for radio, which, well, sort of inspired me to move away from video. While most people would argue that a video-based platform would be more work; trust me on this, I have been called lazy for writing, I still think writing is the hardest form of communication, no matter which language it is.
On a side note; despite what I said, I have enjoyed video editing off-late, so, yes, WE ARE ON YOUTUBE. Please subscribe to our channel here; we will be posting videos soon.

Coming back to the blog, it started out as something and has since evolved into something else. The initial struggle was quite significant, but with time, it has evolved into something else. Today, it isn’t just my blog, but has evolved into a community of sorts, thanks to several people who have helped me out with things from sourcing imagery to ideas on what to write, to actually contributing full articles, and of course, reading them. Nobody took a blog about buses seriously, but then I eventually ended up in journalism, and that made people notice, although urban planners and folks actually working in the transport sector despise me and my blog, because I write from a commuters’ perspective.

In the ten years since I this blog started, public transport has changed, the perception about it has also changed. At the same time, we’ve all grown up with our views also shifting significantly over time. I want this blog to be a reflection of that change, the evolution, although transport in principle, does remain the same.

As I sign off, I want to thank all those who have supported me over the last decade and more, especially my parents, whose reaction I dreaded when I first started BESTpedia, my friends, my mentors, and well-wishers.

I’d like to dedicate this post in memoriam to my late father.

Featured Image: BESTpedia turns ten. Image generated using Adobe Firefly with text added manually because GenAI is terrible at adding text to images.

“Where Should I Look?” BMTC’s LED Displays Are Well, Confusing

In early 2024, the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) made a slight tweak to some of their buses. The front LED display would now display the route number on the right hand side instead of the left. This model was last seen in pre-LED buses, especially in Maharashtra such as with BEST and NNMT on the rolling cloth displays. Prior to the advent of LED displays, the route display on BMTC buses was on a metal plate with the number in the centre, the origin on the left hand side and the destination on the right hand side.

The advent of LED displays brought in a standard display layout, not just across buses of the BMTC, but across the globe. World-wide, LED displays on buses generally show the route number on the left-hand side and destination or route to the right-hand side. The reason for this is that most languages are read from left to right and people tend to look at the number first since the number is an easier identifier than the destination. Interestingly, in countries that follow the right-left scripts such as Israel (Hebrew), Iran (Persian), UAE (Arabic) and Pakistan (Urdu), the order is the same. The route number is on the left hand side.

In a 2024 article titled LED Riding Hoods, Bangalore Mirror reported that this was done to make it easier to spot buses, especially when there multiple buses at a bus stop. Commuters were apparently welcoming of the move immediately as well. Several commuters suggested going to the original pre-LED format of having the origin and destination on either side with the number in the centre, which makes limited sense.

BMTC's new inverted LED display format (Srikanth Ramakrishnan/BESTpedia) — BMTC’s new inverted LED display format (Srikanth Ramakrishnan/BESTpedia)

However, this layout is rather confusing. For starters, the human brain is wired to read things in a certain order. In the case of Bangalore, where bus stops sometimes have longer names, and don’t entirely fit on to the display and are scrolling, this is a bigger issue. We view the number first and then the destination. When the text gets truncated at the end of the display, we wait for the text to scroll. Now when the number is located at the end, it confuses the brain.
Further, the side and rear displays on the bus feature the conventional format of the number first and then the route. With BMTC adopting newer and more complicated bus numbers, this also eats away at the space, for example: in this reel, one can see route numbers such as HSRFDR1 and HSRFDR1A. Now, while this eats up more than half the space on the right hand side a passenger might mistake it to be part of the route itself.

A second problem is the absolute lack of uniformity. This inverted layout is only there on select buses from BMTC’s regular Bengaluru Sarige fleet (white buses, the green Suvarna fleet and the blue BS6 fleet). The Volvo fleet, the Corona fleet and the entire wet-leased electric fleet (Switch non-AC, Switch AC and Tata Marcopolo) feature the conventional display layout. This makes it very confusing for commuters while waiting for a bus stop.

(Top) A BMTC Volvo bus using the standard LED display format
(Bottom) A BMTC Switch bus using the standard LED display format

Now, going back to historical layouts from the pre-LED era; I had mentioned that BEST buses in Mumbai did feature the bus number on the right hand side. However, the reason this worked was because of a physical separation of the two entities. The rolling cloth display was essentially two units – one for the route and another for the destination.

(Top) A BEST bus using the older rolling cloth display (Image credit: Aavesh601)
(Bottom) A BMTC Suvarna bus using the older metal plate display (Image credit: RisingCitizen)

BMTC needs to figure out a way to reduce the confusion. What are your views?

Featured Image: A graphical representative of the two different LED display layouts on a BMTC bus (Srikanth Ramakrishnan/BESTpedia)

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Show Some Love: Go on, Share!

Show Some Love: Go on, Share!