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Author: Srikanth
BEST? Bus!
Vroom, *pulls bellpull*
Hi, I'm Srikanth. I'm a freelance media fellow with a fascination for buses, toll plazas, fire trucks and drones.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
(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)
We Should Have A Few Cats On Public Transport Systems In India
Alright, this might seem a little offbeat but hear me out. Let’s talk about cats. Cats are wonderful creatures. Sure, they may be naughty but they’re great at making people feel better. And they’re cute.
The internet is rife with pictures and videos of cats and kittens at various public transport hubs across the world, especially in Istanbul, Turkiye. Recently, videos went viral of a feline napping atop the turnstiles at a metro station in Bengaluru.
Since then, I’ve observed numerous felines across multiple transit points – mostly metro stations – across Bengaluru, Mumbai, Chennai and Pune. In each case, someone either petted them or just gushed in excitement. I did both.
Cats are excellent creatures in public spaces. Apart from being adorable, they help in keeping pests under control. They’re natural predators and can easily take down mice, rats, pigeons and other creatures that can cause disease.
Take the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office in United Kingdom for example. It’s role, as the title specifies is to catch mice in the government office. The role originated in the 1500s and has been prominent given how London was rife with rodents – often carrying disease-causing germs – which also ate a lot of the governments documents. Of course, that may not be the case now, but who does go “awwwww” when they see Larry the cat? Or remember the story of James Bowen (who sold the street newspaper The Big Issue) and his cat Bob?
There are numerous examples of cats in public transport. They’ve been known to board buses, trains, or just sit at platforms and sometimes take a nap atop a turnstile. They’ve been seen across the world, not just in the UK or Turkiye, but in Japan, France and other parts of the world.
Contrary to popular belief, cats are not some evil, self-serving creatures, but extremely lovable and cute animals. And they’re extremely adorable.
So what’s your view on this?
Featured Image: A Cat sitting near a Train (Image generated via OpenArt using Flux/Cute Crayon)
Silcon Valley Reinvents The Bus With Uber Introducing “Route Share”
In a twist that’s almost as surprising as finding a techie without a smartphone, the clever folks at Uber over in Silicon Valley have set their sights on reinventing something we all thought was already pretty nifty: the bus. Yes, you heard it right! Those “innovative minds” from the San Francisco Bay Area have become quite the modern-day alchemists, turning the mundane into the “revolutionary,” from homelessness to success, and even trains.
Last month, Uber rolled out a new feature called “Route Share,” which promises cheap, fixed-route rides during those delightful rush hours in various American cities. Now, if this doesn’t make you think of your good old neighborhood bus, I don’t know what will! But wait, there’s more. This feature lets users save nearly fifty percent off the standard UberX fare. Imagine that! Shuttles will chug along predetermined routes every 20 minutes, all thanks to Uber’s Movement platform, which has more data on route patterns and traffic than your grandma has recipes.
Now, Uber isn’t exactly new to the shuttle game. They’ve had a Shuttle feature for a while, using different buses depending on the city. In India, they’ve even started using electric buses manufactured by Eka Mobility. Fancy, huh? These buses generally follow the Chalo Bus Model, and in Gurgaon, Uber operates something called Gurugaman Plus. It seems like Silicon Valley has indeed reinvented the bus, for probably the umpteenth time.
But let’s not stop there. Silicon Valley has a knack for reinventing all sorts of things. Taxes? Reinvented. Trains? Reinvented. Homelessness? You guessed it—reinvented. Elon Musk’s grand Hyperloop concept was essentially a high-speed rail, or in this case, a Maglev rail, dressed up in futuristic garb. And his Boring Company? Well, building tunnels for vehicles isn’t exactly a new idea, but hey, it sounds cooler when Elon does it.
When it comes to Uber, Ola, and their various counterparts, the difference is mostly that you can book a ticket on the bus, pay with the app, and have guaranteed seating. Essentially, what was already a feature in inter-city buses has now become a feature in intra-city buses. It’s like when Reliance Jio, after its ‘free’ phase during launch, essentially offered postpaid rates for prepaid plans. Groundbreaking, right?
And let’s not forget Ola’s Share Express feature in India, where you’d be picked up at specific points en route, just like a bus stop. It’s almost as if someone looked at a bus and thought, “What if we made it… an app?”
In case you’re wondering: A company named Cooperative Capital allowed neighbours to pool in money to enable them to ‘invest’ in their communities. That’s taxes. As for homelessness; well, the image below should help.
Featured Image: Silicon Valley reinventing the bus, not metaphorically, but literally, generated by Apple Intelligence
Lack Of Change Pushes Private Buses In Kolkata’s IT Sector To Accept UPI
In a very interesting twist of events, a few private bus operators plying along the tech areas of Kolkata have decided to accept UPI payments due to an issue with spare change. One some routes, bus operators have to shell out commissions of up to 10 per cent to get change for larger amounts, leading to significant losses. Thus, they’re looking at digital payments to plug leakages, according to a Times of India report dated 31 May 2025.
Several buses have started doing this, and based on the success rate, all 38 buses on the route may switch to digital payments. Most of the buses ply on the Barasat, Santragachi, Botanic Garden, Howrah Shibpur, route which serves passengers going to New Town.
The move was welcomed by a lot of people, including those from Kolkata Bus-O-Pedia, a Facebook group of busfans. Members of the group said that they had seen the system in use in Bengaluru on BMTC buses. They also cautioned bus owners and asked them to frame the QR code to prevent it from being manipulated.
Fun fact: A nearly identical article by the same author (Dwaiyapayan Ghosh) featuring similar quotes was published by the Times of India on 25 January 2023.
At this time, I am yet to ascertain whether WBTC buses accept digital payments or not although I know they have printed tickets.
Featured Image: Cartoon Man Scanning QR Code inside Bus (Le Chat/Mistral AI)
The Rise Of GenAI And Its Terrible Effects On Blogging
Alright, please do bear with me for this rant. It has nothing to do with buses, public transport or anything else on this blog for that matter. However, it has everything to do with the blog as a concept and also the media industry in general. I spent a considerable amount of time pondering where to post this – here, on my older Blogger account, on my Medium account or on LinkedIn – and eventually chose to write this down here.
Remember when we first heard about the buzzwords like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) and other terms like neural networks, natural language processing and all? We all expected KITT from Knight Rider. Or at least expect Bonzi Buddy or Microsoft’s Clippit (also known as Clippy) to understand what we were saying and respond. Instead, what we got was well …..
Come 2010s and the possibility of AI actually generating coherent looks like a real possibility. And thus begins the so-called AI boom with an explosive number of Generative AI or GenAI products out there such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini (formerly Bard), X’s Grok and others.
Now the reason for this post is an ad that I saw earlier that irked me.
The ad was from a company called ContentGorilla that declared that ‘Manual Blogging’ was “dead” and in its caption, said ‘Why spend 2+ hours writing, formatting and SEO-optimizing a blog post’.
Now before going forward, let me iterate that there is no such thing as ‘Manual Blogging’. Let me also reiterate that I have nothing against this company in particular either. It’s just that there has been a lot of resentment among bloggers due to the rise of GenAI and this nonsensical ad just brought out that resentment, at least in me.
What is being described here as ‘Manual Blogging’ is in reality, BLOGGING. Anything else, is just junk, or spam. If you want to know why, let us just look at the etymology of blogging. The term is a truncation of the phrase ‘weblog’. It evolved from an online diary where people gave a running account of their lives. Early bloggers often referred to themselves as ‘diarists’ and ‘journalers’.
The purpose of blogging is to write. That requires passion, and not a tool to offer SEO-optimized paragraphs peppered with words to grab the attention of search engines. Bloggers write for an audience. That audience is human. We write for people. Tools that are offering to write an entire SEO-optimised blogpost? Well, you’re just doing it for another machine right? So let the machines talk to themselves, while we humans write to each other.
If it were up to whatever such GenAI programmes are offering, people wouldn’t be blogging anymore. Why should we? The purpose of blogging is to express oneself. And a machine cannot do that. It can at best create an illusion of doing so.
As this blog nears its tenth anniversary, I’d like to reiterate that I’m not using any GenAI tools for the content. I may use them for the images, but even there they are all junk.
Big Tech had already made it difficult for small bloggers like me by hurting revenue streams and censoring us. Google still refuses to index certain webpages and has stymied ad revenue by two-thirds of what it was earlier. GenAI is just making it worse for us by flooding the internet with machine-generated text that is mostly junk. If you’re main audience is a machine, then why bring the human into the picture?
The internet is getting saturated with GenAI’s junk, thus hurting those of us who have a genuine passion for the art and craft of writing.
On that note, to all those millionaire and billionaires in India who claimed that we don’t need our own Large Language Models (LLMs), I have a middle finger to offer you. I spent a good part of the day trying to generate pictures of a RuPay Card for the NCMC and even there, I was thrown Visa and MasterCards.
Featured Image: What AI thinks a person sitting in front of a screen using AI to write a blog post looks like (Llama/MetaAI)
Indian Railways To Consider Access Control At Stations, Here Is A Good Time To Integrate NCMC
In an interesting move, the Indian Railways has decided to pilot a access control system at stations to both control crowding as well as reduce leakage of revenue. Many a transit fan has been advocating this for a while now, with some of us arguing that the best time to do this being the 2020 lockdown. However, in hindsight, that would have been difficult. However, it is not too late.
Indian Railways began work after learning from the Mahakumbh of 2025, a high-population event. In a press communique published via the Press Information Bureau in March, the IR announced various measures taken. The first measure taken was the creation of holding areas at various station to ensure that passengers were allowed to enter the platform only when the train arrived. Holding areas were created at several stations, with the main ones being Surat, Udhna, Patna and New Delhi for the festival season of 2024. Arrangements were repeated at nine stations in and around Prayagraj during the Mahakumbh with pilot projects being implemented at New Delhi, Anand Vihar, Varnasi, Ayodhya and Ghaziabad. Permanent holding areas will be implemented across 60 stations where complete access control would be implemented. As part of the access control measure, holders of confirmed tickets would be given direct access to platforms, while those holding waitlisted tickets or without tickets would be in the waiting area and all unauthorised entry points to the station would be sealed.
Two new footbridge standards – 12 metre (60 feet) and a 6 metre (40 feet) wide – have been designed which will be installed across all 60 stations. CCTV cameras will also be installed across the station with a war room to accommodate all officers being established to handle crowded situations. One very exciting development is the deployment of communication hardware including walkie-talkies.
The sale of tickets will also be regulated, especially during rush hours and the issue of platform tickets will be halted at such times, barring for those who are reaching the station to aid those who may require assistance.
The Railway Board has tasked the zones to identify railway stations to further establish electronic access control, similar to rapid transit systems. Western Railway has announced a list of 12 stations, of which three – Bandra Terminus, Andheri and Borivali – fall under the Mumbai division.
While most of what the Railways’ has said relates to long distance trains – made evident by the fact that the three stations in Mumbai that WR has chosen all have long-distance trains halting there – it is still indicative of what future plans are.
It is at this time that Indian Railways can consider integrating the NCMC with the network. Especially given that passengers will be restricted to the waiting area till the train arrives, an opportunity appears for it. Specific turnstiles at the station can be configured for the class of coach that will halt in front of it. I had written earlier about possible ways to integrate NCMC with the railways earlier, do read: Indian Railways Should Get On The NCMC Bandwagon.
Additionally, there are certain changes about the NCMC system itself that will be required for its optimal usage. A detailed article on this will follow soon.
Featured Image: What AI thinks Indian Railways with a turnstile looks like (Generated with Flux/Pikaso/Freepik)
When A Double-Decker Bus Jumped The Tower Bridge in London
We’ve seen buses do interesting things. We’ve seen double-decker buses do interesting things as well. But what if I told you about the time that a double-decker bus jumped a drawbridge that was opening up?
It was 30 December 1952. Albert Edward Gunter was driving an AEC Regent III RT double decker bus on Route 78 across the Tower Bridge (not to be confused with the nearby London Bridge, made popular by the rhyme London Bridge is falling down) towards Shoreditch. Back then, when the bridge was to be lifted, a gateman would ring a warning bell, clear the bridge, and then the watchman would raise the bridge. However, on that day, a relief watchman was on duty and things didn’t go as expected. Gunter had already begun driving across the bridge, and was nearly at the edge of the South Bascule as it began to rise.
Realising the trouble he was already in, Gunter floored the accelerator to hit around 19 km/hr and jumped across. Luckily, the North Bascule was yet to go up and Gunter and all 20 of his passengers landed safely on the other side with Gunter being the only injured – he broke his leg. Interestingly, the bus was intact too.
For his act of bravery and quick thinking, Gunter was given a £10 reward and a day off. When asked how he would spend his reward money, his response was, “Five for me, and five for the missus”, referring to his wife. Later, Gunter apparently said “I’d always wanted to jump the bus over the gap! And I got a day off and a tenner for it, to boot!”
According to the Tower Bridge section of City Bridge Foundation (Bridge House Estates), the incident has since become a part of London’s culture and many pop-culture references have been made.
The 1997 musical comedy Spice World starring the British pop girl band Spice Girls had a scene where Victoria “Posh Spice” Adams (Victoria Beckham) drove a bus decorated in the Union Jack across the bridge with the bascules lifted. Of course, it was filmed with a scale model. The British preschool animated series Peppa Pig had an episode titled Peppa Goes To London where the Queen (Elizabeth II) gives Peppa a bus tour and being impatient drives across the open bridge. The incident was also the inspiration for the children’s book The Tower Bridge Cat featuring a cat named Bella and a bus driving off the bridge. Cats and buses, two of my favourite topics, seems fun, eh? You can learn more about the award-winning book and its sequels here.
Tower Bridge in fact even has an educational tour of the incident for school children, completed with a costumed storytelling session.
Buses can be a fun topic. Remember, when the Russians dressed up as a bus or when racing Double Decker buses was a televised sport?
Featured image: Reconstruction of a the AEC Regent III RT on the Tower Bridge (Image created by Samuel Sathiyanathan for BESTpedia)