Surat: Mayor to travel by city bus to office once every week

SURAT: Mayor Dr Jagdish Patel has come up with a sure-shot solution tackle the recently hiked fine for traffic rule violation. Patel posted his announcement of travelling at least once a week to his office in city bus on his twitter handle and also encourage people to use public transport.
Patel tweeted on Friday that he will use city bus as a symbolic move to promote public transport and requested general public to use BRTS and city buses to its optimum benefit.
“I will travel to my office every Wednesday in a city bus. This will save fuel, reduce traffic and help create less pollution symbolically,” said Patel, an ayurveda doctor. He will travel around 5km from his home to his office in Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) headquarters at Mughal Sarai.
“People should use public transport for multiple benefits. At present more than 2.30 lakh people are using around 700 city and BRTS buses plying daily and the SMC is working to improve the public transport infrastructure,” he added.
Urban transport expert Gaurang Joshi, a professor at SVNIT, believes that public transport infrastructure needs to give priority to pedestrians first. “It is good initiative by city mayor and it will definitely encourage people to use existing bus service. Meanwhile, we need to create pedestrian friendly infrastructure. There is a need to improve bus frequency, accessibility of bus stop and quality of buses,” he said.
SMC is gradually increasing the number of buses and battery-operated buses are also going to be introduced in the fleet of buses.