BRTS infrastructure on Ahmednagar road to be brought down for metro work
The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) had spent crores of rupees for erecting bus stops, making dedicated lanes, installing Intelligent Transport Management System (ITMS) and automatic sliding doors for bus stops, but all this infrastructure will soon go to waste as work on this BRTS corridor has already begun.
Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) infrastructure on Ahmednagar road will soon be brought down owing to the Vanaz-Ramwadi metro corridor which passes through the BRTS route.
The BRTS corridor on Ahmednagar road became operational in April 2016. The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) had spent crores of rupees for erecting bus stops, making dedicated lanes, installing Intelligent Transport Management System (ITMS) and automatic sliding doors for bus stops, but all this infrastructure will soon go to waste as work on this BRTS corridor has already begun.
Civic activist Qaneez Sukhrani criticised the municipal corporation and said, “It is a complete waste of tax payer’s money. Both the BRTS and metro projects are funded by the central government. We can understand if the PMC messed up in planning which is a common thing, but atleast people from the central government should have taken care that both corridors do not come under the same route. Ideally, BRTS and other public transport systems should be feeder to metro which is a simple principle.”
Meanwhile, PMC commissioner Kunal Kumar said, “The service will be operational till the metro rail starts. In any case, BRTS has to be converted into a feeder service.”
The way metro work is speeding up in the city, it shows that in a period of hardly one year, the infrastructure erected for the BRTS corridor will have to be broken to erect pillars for the elevated metro routes.
The metro work for both corridors, Pimpri-Chinchwad to Swargate and Vanaz to Ramwadi, has already started.
Officials from PMC and metro are accepting off record, in a satirical way, that it is good there is BRTS corridor on the metro route as the metro will not need to erect separate barricade while carrying on the work. They can restrict the work in the dedicated BRTS corridor as permanent barricades already exist.
PMC has planned most of the metro and BRTS routes on the same corridor. PMC failed to execute the BRTS on all the planned routes for which it got more than Rs 1,000 crore grant from the central government. Instead of erecting the BRTS, the PMC completed only road works from these funds.