MTC News – Six bus services flagged off

CHENNAI: Anyone with a ration card can pay a fee of Rs.385 and apply for an autorickshaw permit to the Transport Department, as per the new norms for the permits that will come into force shortly.

Following the announcement in the Assembly that the issuing of autorickshaw permits would be liberalised, Transport Minister K.N.Nehru said, “A Government Order amending the rules will be issued within the next couple of days.”

Speaking to The Hindu on the sidelines of an event organised to flag off six new bus servicess from Ekkaduthangal on Wednesday, Mr.Nehru said, “Autorickshaw unions want the ‘open’ permit to be granted only to drivers. Such categorisation will only lead to a new type of control. A meeting will be organised with the unions shortly to sort out differences.”

As attempts to regulate autorickshaw trip fares have failed, he said, competition among drivers would be employed to bring in regulation.

Launching the new bus routes, Mr. Nehru announced that the mini-bus scheme would be inaugurated by Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi in three months. “Tamil Nadu has the highest number of two-wheelers in the country. Connecting mini-bus services to the nearest depots will boost the patronage of public transport,” he said.

The six new bus routes are K18cut (Ekkaduthangal – Broadway via Saidapet), M10E (Ekkaduthangal – Broadway via T.Nagar), M21GExt (Ekkaduthangal – Broadway via Kotturpuram), M154E (Ekkaduthangal – Vellavedu), M88E (Ekkaduthangal – Kundrathur) and 554B (Ekkaduthangal to Sunguvarchatram).

As the patronage of MTC buses has increased from 33 lakh to 55 lakh in the past four years, Mr.Nehru said there was a need for 5,000 buses to meet the demand. The MTC’s fleet strength of 3,300 buses would hopefully be increased to 4,000 by the year-end, he added.

Mayor M.Subramanian said that most interior localities in Saidapet rely on Ekkaduthangal for transit. “All inter-city buses will also have to stop in the Ekkaduthangal bus stop,” he added.

Copyright: The Hindu
Source:

This entry was posted by TNSTC.

2 thoughts on “MTC News – Six bus services flagged off

  1. Sir, I have been a regular commuter of 29-C A/C Bus from Perambur to Thiruvanmiyur. For the past entire week, the 29-C Bus was not operated. I understand from the friends that the above service has been stopped abruptly. I do not know whether it is official or not. However, on behalf of the regular commuters of 29-C, I request that the Services of 29-C be restored. Otherwise, commuters like me will be put to much hardship. I am working as Private Secretary to the Commissioner in the Income Tax Department. Morning, I find it very convenient to get down in fron of my office. In the evening, I will reach Central from Thousand Light Bus Stand.

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: