A bus coloured Blue

Delhi’s Blueline mess tells the saga of the crisis of accountability in our cities...

Let me begin with a few disclaimers. First, while I have taken the bus on occasion, I am not a frequent bus traveler and I do not recall using a Blueline bus this year. Second, regardless of any appearance of callous calculation in comparing numbers of dead, I have the deepest regard for human life, and any avoidable death is a death too many.

That said, it is useful to reflect on what a little media attention can do. The number of fatalities attributable to the Blueline buses is around 6 per cent of total traffic fatalities, roughly 100 out of 1900 last year and this number has actually dropped a little since 2004. But, there is much to improve in the way private operators provide public bus services.

The key decision of government is to stop the current individual permit system and only permit organisations that have at least a hundred vehicles to provide services. Will this address the problem? To answer the question, it is useful to ask how a Blueline bus is different from any other bus. Is it that these buses are badly maintained and therefore more prone to accidents from equipment failure? Is the quality of drivers poor and do they compulsively drive at higher speeds?

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The hope presumably is that a larger organisation will be better able to maintain the fleet as compared to individual owners. Also, while it is natural for owners to prefer less experienced and therefore less expensive drivers, one expects enforcement may be easier with larger organisations, who have more at stake, including reputational capital.

In enforcing regulations, it is useful to consider that they are designed not so much to ensure that they are followed but as a means of rent extraction. What we choose to regulate and how we choose to enforce it determine the kinds of actions that the regulated entities take. In addition to regulating practices like driver qualifications and vehicle certification, if there were clear financial and legal consequences of injuring a person, both for driver and bus-owner, they would exercise much more self-regulation than they do presently.

However, over-speeding is not just due to bad drivers, but also due to the contractual relationship with the bus owner. The current scheme, where the bus owner retains the fare revenue, means that each bus is in competition to pick up as many passengers as possible. If they pick up fewer at one stop, the urge is to race the previous bus to get to the next stop earlier. While schedules governing the timing of each bus are supposedly in effect, these are rarely followed because of problems with monitoring. Contrast this to the now abandoned kilometre scheme, where the fare revenue was retained by DTC. While there was a tendency to miss bus stops, since stopping consumed more fuel, overspeeding to pick passengers was not a major problem. However, if commuters are not certain that every bus will stop, many of them will be on the streets, craning to see if their bus is visible and then trying to wave it down. Given that our bus stops are not particularly safe, this contributes to more accidents. The form of contract does matter for how buses and commuters behave.

Another feature likely to increase chances of accidents is overcrowding. In part, this is because the system does not have the capacity to carry the peak load traffic, but it is also because of uncertainty about when the next bus will arrive. How many times have you seen a crowded bus on one route followed closely by another that is much emptier? A simple tracking and information system that lets people at the bus stop know when the next bus can be expected should reduce overcrowding.

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Such a system is available in many international cities and is not difficult to install. Apart from letting commuters know when the next bus will arrive, it will track the location of every bus in the public transport system, monitor whether it is stopping at the designated stops, and following its route. This equipment can be made mandatory for all DTC buses and those running on scheduled routes. This will improve service delivery by improving monitoring and providing more commuter information. These can then be supplemented with bio-metric systems that ensure only authorised drivers can drive the vehicle. More benefits would come from an integrated ticketing system that would link into other transport modes like the Metro, like we see in London and Shanghai today.

Would it be expensive? Not very. Indeed, my guess is that it will be less than what is needed to build a couple of kilometers of Metro line. The DTC almost installed such as system a few years ago. If that were in place, maybe we would be focusing on fatal accidents caused by private cars and bad infrastructure instead. The accountability story there is not much better.

The writer is senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research

pmukhopadhyay@gmail.com