CHENNAI : The website of the Metropolitan Transportation Corporation (MTC) which hundreds of commuters depend on daily has been receiving a lot of flak. Commuters complain about its primitive design is not user-friendly and displaying of erroneous information about the buses. Now, the website has been under construction for over a month. MTC also invested in a facility like GPS to reflect actual bus operations, but has failed to provide such real-time information for almost a decade now.

“One of the biggest problems for commuters is that they are unaware of the timings of the buses and also, the bus numbers. With tardy public information booths in most of the bus terminals and the website not working, we are forced to opt for other modes of transport,” said K Venugopalan from Thiruvanmiyur.

The government, this year, announced that by early 2019, commuters in Chennai will get a mobile application that will tell them when the next MTC bus will halt at their location. But, till then it seems like the hardship will continue.

Even before the website was shut for construction, there were many errors in it. MTC operates ordinary, express, deluxe, volvo and small buses of which small bus route numbers are prefixed with the letter ‘S’. But, the database of the website is errant as most of the regular routes are also prefixed with ‘S’, thereby confusing commuters.

“About 50 buses are wrongly prefixed with ‘S’.  For example, the regular bus route 47A from Besant Nagar to ICF is mentioned as S47A and the regular route 7E is prefixed as S07E from Broadway to Ambattur Estate,” said Murali Krishna from Ambattur.Also, the fares mentioned in the website according to stages (price as per kilometres) are not followed in all the buses, and so even this is confusing. 

Another major issue is the bus timings. Karthik Kumar, a resident of T Nagar said, “It must be more than five years since the website had any changes. With changed road patterns due to ongoing Metro construction and increased traffic, the timings are at least 30 minutes more than what is mentioned in the website.”When contacted, an official from MTC said the website will be ready in ten days and that the changes will be taken into account.