With
the onset of the monsoon, I find that a whole lot of BEST buses, the commuter
artery of Mumbai, lacking route indicators. Obviously the electronic route
indicators that were installed on many a bus about a year or so back were not
functioning. The reason can well be the rain water that may have seeped on to
the circuit board rendering it out of order or just plain lack of maintenance.
I
have multiple questions on the installation of these electronic route
indicators starting with a very basic one which is are they really necessary as
compared to the old generation low tech manually operated ones that had almost
a zero chance of malfunction. And not to forget almost no or low maintenance.
The
old route indicators were a simple mechanical system. It was a cloth scroll
attached to rollers with different routes and route numbers printed on it
depending on which depot the bus was to be assigned to. It had a glass frontage
for visibility with a back light for easy viewing at night. The conductor was
responsible for changing the route on the side indicator and the driver would
do so for the front. All you had to do was roll the scroll till you got the
route you wanted. There was another benefit to those scrolls and that was colour
identification. If the route number was in red on white, it was a
"limited" bus meaning that it halted only at a few stops. The regular
ones were in white on black. And if it was an express bus, the route number was
in yellow. Thus even if one were not able to decipher the route number from a
distance, the colour of the route number would definitely indicate whether it
was worthwhile to make a dash for it. It was highly uncommon for these
indicators to break down. Maintenance possibly involved greasing the rollers
and changing the back light. Once in a while the scroll would gather on one
side rendering it difficult to read the route. However all it needed was a bit
of straightening to bring it to order. No need for a specialist or waiting
period to get it repaired.
Coming
back to the present, you have an electronic indicator where the route and the
bus number scroll from right to left without giving you a single window view.
You are therefore left waiting for the entire route to scroll to figure out whether
you need to line up for that bus or let it go. It can be quite frustrating.
Given
that the quality of ride is the same, I wonder whether there is really a need
for electronic route indicators on busses that nowhere come close to their
western counterparts in all aspects. Some things can remain low tech or no tech
without much disruption to life.
In
all this there is one thing that has not changed and that is the bus route and
number being written in chalk on the windscreen of the bus or on the body. Whether
it be the old cloth scroll or an electronic scroll, the back-up is the same.
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