BMTC to go intelligent, will introduce vehicle tracking, electronic ticketing & passenger information systems

BENGALURU: If what Bengaluru’s transport utility BMTC claims is anything to go by, then the face of public transportation in India’s Silicon Valley is poised for a change with the public transporter going for Intelligent Transport System (ITS). ET got a first-look at what the utility believes is going to be a game-changer.
BMTC is the first transport utility in the country to embrace ITS, the first leg of which will be launched in about a month. The vehicle tracking system (VTS), the electronic ticketing system (ETS) and the passenger information system (PIS) form the core of ITS.

The VTS involves the digitisation of routes or schedules as the BMTC terms them, through an agreement with Google and the installation of a vehicle tracking unit (VTU) inside every bus. According to BMTC insiders, close to 90% of BMTC’s bus routes, numbering almost 6,400, have been digitised and 5,873 buses, out of a total of 6,388 have been fitted with a VTU.

According to BMTC Director (IT) Bishwajit Mishra, the VTS would help in the identification of buses which skip particular bus stations, miss their scheduled departure times, deviate from their specified routes, indulge in over-speeding, are lying stationary outside of their respective depots for more than 15 minutes, and identify redundant schedules run by buses operating too closely to each other, a phenomenon the BMTC has termed ‘bus-bunching’.




The data from VTS are updated every 10 seconds during peak hours and 15 seconds during other times at which the frequency of buses is expected to dip and will be monitored by a BMTC control room, which will communicate with the buses through a speaker set up in each bus.




The electronic ticketing meters (ETM), built by Verifone, will collect details of every ticket bought and will send them to back-end servers maintained by Trimax, where this information will be integrated with other details being fed in by the VTS. Almost 10,000 ETM’s have been procured.

While the ETS will bring in transparency in revenue collection and aid BMTC with specific report generation, such as schedule-wise revenue collection and bus-wise revenue collection, the PIS will inform the passengers about estimated time of arrival (ETA) to a particular bus stop, time taken for a passenger from their current location to their intended stop and last bus station crossed.



Ashwin Mahesh, urban transport expert, expected that the ETA would be accurate to within five seconds for shorter trips and a minute, for trips longer than half an hour, barring any unexpected developments such as breakdowns, protests or other emergencies leading to road blockage.


The PIS, will consist of two parts – LED screens across nine major traffic and transit management centres (TTMC) initially and 35 major bus stands later and the official BMTC app, which will provide passengers with all the details of the PIS on their smartphones.



Mishra also says that the app which till now contained static data, will now receive real-time data but will not drain the smartphone’s resources consuming each bus’ data in kilobytes (KB).