Effectiveness of PT Subsidies & Travel Characteristics of Pass Holders

Reliable, affordable, and safe public transport is a need for Indian cities in view of the declining usage of public transport. To provide transit services to citizens, public transit operators seek subsidies from the government and provide concessions (reductions in fares) to commuters.

The main purpose of public transport subsidy policies is to provide affordable transit services to citizens. However, it is not clear how well these subsidies meet the objectives of promoting commuting via public transport. Empirical evidence is seldom limited to the number of passes issued by the operators. The travel characteristics of beneficiary commuters have neither been analyzed nor considered for planning perspectives, and revision in concession schemes.

The study aims to extract the travel concession-pass structure and its utilization. The study would focus on the public transport services, BMTC, and Metro in Bengaluru city.

The study evolved in four milestones with the first milestone to understand the features of the current travel pass system and usage.second milestone gathers the public opinion through  public interaction surveys. The third milestone was to draft the recommendations to set the policies from gap assessment. And the last milestone concises the overall study into a nutshell.