BENGALURU: Bengaluru’s transport lifeline, the BMTC, is adopting to new technologies to provide better services to passengers and to speed up operations. The BMTC is now preparing to install Automatic Passenger Counter (APC) On Board Occupancy system for counting passengers boarding BMTC buses and tender has already been called for this.
Through this APC installation, it will be possible to get more accurate information about how many passengers boarded the buses, how many alighted, at which stop there is more passenger movement and how many people were in the bus at what time.
The APC device will be installed near passenger doors of buses, and movement of passengers will be automatically recorded through sensors and onboard equipment. This will put brake on ticket theft by conductors. Along with that, information about conductors’ work performance, number of seats in bus, schedule, load to passengers etc. will be available.
In first phase it is being installed experimentally in 50 buses, and BMTC has decided to install this technology in all buses by coming new year or by January. “The device will capture images on camera and through facial recognition, it will give us details of how many people boarded and deboarded a bus. This will help us know how many people exactly are in a bus”, said Kiran Kumar, chief technical engineer of BMTC.
Further, he said, “The system will help us tally the number of tickets issued and the number of passengers in a bus. We are conducting a trial of the system and will call for tenders to install the APC devices in 50 buses in the first phase. Based on the results, we will install it in all the 6,000 buses. We are also planning to mandatorily have this in all buses purchased in future”, he added.
