A year without bus shelters, that’s how Smart the City is

Ramkrishan Upadhyay

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 15

It has been over a year since the UT Administration dismantled old bus queue shelters in the city but there is no sign of new ones coming up.

The delay in construction of new bus queue shelters is forcing commuters to endure vagaries of weather. They have to stand under the open sky braving chilly winds during winters and rain. The plight of children going to school is inexplicable. At various bus stops, the elderly commuters are forced to wait while standing. Their ordeal becomes more unpleasant when it rains.

The Administration had dismantled over 300 bus queue shelters made of stainless steel in November last year. Since then, the departments concerned — transport, engineering and architecture — failed to come up with a common design of the new bus queue shelters.

Sources said while the Department of Architecture had prepared and sent the design long ago, the Transport Department and the Department of Engineering want some changes to meet their requirement. The sources said during a meeting of senior officials of the three departments recently, it was decided that the transport and engineering departments would now get the model of bus queue shelters prepared as per their requirement and present it before the committee for the final nod.

The sources said the Department of Architecture had finalised the design to meet the demand of Smart City. It proposed to construct bus queue shelters on public-private partnership. The company will not only construct these shelters but will also operate and maintain them. The company would earn revenue through advertisements displayed on bus queue shelters. The new design was in harmony with the intelligent traffic system to be adopted by the CTU. It had a provision for parking of cycles under a bike sharing scheme.

When contacted, Finance Secretary Ajoy Kumar Sinha said he had directed the departments concerned to come up with the design soon so that the final decision could be taken at the earliest. He said once the design was finalised, the work on bus queue shelters would start without any delay.