Till about a week ago, passengers waiting for Telangana State Road Transport Corporation (TSRTC) buses had to sweat it out in the scorching heat at several bus stops. With the arrival of the monsoon, they are likely to get drenched waiting for their ride.
This inconvenience, however, could soon be a thing of the past as the transport juggernaut and Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) have come to an understanding to either move existing bus shelters to more feasible locations or construct dozens of such structures.
“We have identified 411 such bus shelters. Of these, there is a need to move 111 shelters as passengers are facing problems. The GHMC and an agency it has identified will get 80 bus shelters moved to locations where they are actually needed, places where there is a significant number of passengers who take the bus,” said a senior TSRTC official.
The understanding, the official said, is to construct 80 bus shelters “immediately”. “Work on three such bus shelters in Dilsukhnagar has already begun,” the official said.
In the past, the TSRTC had sought over 609 new bus shelters across the city for its passengers, given that some of them had either fallen into disuse or were in a dilapidated condition. “There was a lot of back and forth that happened, which took up a lot of time,” an official said.
TSRTC’s Greater Hyderabad Zone (GHZ) transports between nine lakh to 12 lakh passengers a day. In March this year, a daily average of approximately 10 lakh passengers used the juggernaut’s buses to reach their destinations.
According to bus users, there are several places where there is a pressing need for bus shelters, such as one at Punjagutta Crossroads, under the flyover. However, on account of a paucity of space and traffic concerns, a bus shelter here is unlikely, forcing passengers to wait, in precarious circumstances, for their buses.
“One other important issue that we face is private vehicles blocking bus stops and shelters. It is because of this that buses halt a good distance from bus stops and we have to rush to catch them,” said Md Yasin, a frequent 49M bus user.
