BMTC Bus Stop Accessibility

Bus stops are very important considering every trip starts and ends at one of them. There are many qualities of bus stop that would affect the quality of commute. One of them is coverage area of the bus stop. The public transit/commute usage directly depends on how near or far the bus stop is. Of course quality of internal roads, footpath and other things matter too. But distance is very important. Lets say if the bus stop is just 100mtrs then I wouldn't mind walking on a bad footpath to reach the stop v/s if its 1km away.

Below I have tried to explore this factor with the available geo-locations of 900+ bus stops in Bangalore. I started with 300mtrs as the coverage range. As you can see in the heatmap of bus stops. There are huge empty pockets. Most areas don't have bus stops in their immediate vicinity.

busstop_300_mtrs

At 400meters its better. But still not great.
busstop_400mtrs

At 500 meters.
busstop_500mtrs

At 750 meters.
busstop_750_mtrs

At 1 KM, it looks like most of the Bangalore is covered. But there are still huge pockets on the highways, outskirts of the city, army areas etc. And there are some areas which are not covered at all for some unknown reason.

busstop_1_km

But 1KM is too much of walk for anybody walk. I would be ready to walk at the most 500 meters to catch a bus. So I decided to re-look at it.

Lets look at 500 meters again

busstop_500mtrs

When I zoomed in. I found more pockets.
busstop_500_mtrs_2

One more level there are more empty pockets where buses dont reach.
busstop_500_mtrs_3
Even if I am ready to walk half a kilometer, I may not find a bus stop in certain parts of Bangalore. So don't complain if some one doesn't catch public bus. Good chance is that there are no bus stops nearby.

12 Responses

  1. November 29, 2013

    […] BMTC bus stop accessiblity thejeshgn.com/2013/11/29/bmt… […]

  2. March 6, 2014

    […] of the biggest criticism of my previous post about BMTC Bus Stop Accessibility study was that the data was old. I set out to fix that. BMTC now […]