Scared city shuns locals for BEST

MUMBAI: Call it collateral damage. The seven blasts in suburban local trains last month not only took 200 lives, they also seem to have driven a sizeable number of passengers away from the trains.

It may be a temporary phenomenon, but living in a state of fear post 7/11, some Mumbaikars now prefer road travel to suburban trains. In a city where people travel as far as 100km to work, avoiding train journey may be impossible. But more and more people are hitting the road to travel to work and back, suggest new statistics.

“We have registered a rise of 2.5 lakh passengers per day since July 11,” Uttam Khobragde, GM, BEST (Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transportation) told ET. On any given working day, BEST buses carry around 44-45 lakhs passengers from one end of the city to another. This number now has shot up to 46.5-47.5 lakhs per day.

Additional passengers mean additional revenue. BEST is earning around Rs 25 lakh more a day as a result of the increase in passengers. “Our daily collection ranges between Rs 2.2 crore and Rs 2.25 crore. It has gone up to Rs 2.45 to Rs 2.50 crore after the July 11 blasts,” Mr Khobragade said.

Traffic planners think it’s a normal phenomenon. “Fear lingers for a while after an incident of this magnitude,” an official from the traffic department said. He recalled how people were wary of travelling by bus after the December 2, ’02 blast in a bus at Ghatkopar, which killed two and left 31 injured. “It was of far lesser intensity than the July 11 blasts. So it is only natural for travellers to be cautious about local trains,” he said.

Mumbai police’s traffic wing has observed increased activity on roads since 7/11. The city has around 12.2m registered vehicles, while 45,000 to 50,000 vehicles enter the city everyday from suburbs around. “There is a marked increase in this segment. Our numbers suggests that around 9,000 to 10,000 more vehicles enter the city everyday since the July 11,” a traffic police spokesperson said. “People have formed car-pools to avoid suburban trains,” he said.

But DP Mhaiskar, head of Ideal road builders, an agency that collects toll at Mumbai’s entry points, contradicts this arguement. Soon after the blasts the number of private vehicles coming into the city has gone up, but subsequently it has registered a steep fall due to floods and continuous heavy rains, he said. Bad road conditions are also affecting the road traffic.

Pranay Prabhakar, offsicial spokesperson for the Western Railways, said the blasts have had some impact on daily numbers, but added that it was too early to draw any conclusion. “We don’t collect daily data. We compile numbers for every 10 days,” he said.

According to him, first 10 days of every month are busiest for the railways as commuters rush to get their quarterly season tickets. “So like any other month we had large number of passengers buying season tickets in July as well. The blasts took place on July 11. The real impact of the blasts we will get to know only after a month or at the end of the current quarter,” he said.

The Western Railway transports around 32 lakh passengers every day. It pockets on an average around Rs 1.20 crore per day by daily sale of tickets.