Transport trouble: With age limit of buses, owners fear demise of fleet

Court has directed the transport department to test the fitness of all public transport.

KARACHI:

In Karachi, transporters and their age-old vehicles are inseparable. For them, any mechanism to test or limit the age of public buses is akin to dumping their fleet. To carry on business, they will have to replace their old buses with at least 25,000 new ones.

In the public transport sector, the latest vehicles are the Pakistan-made Mazda coaches that were brought in till 2003 after which the company closed its operations. The large Bradford buses have been here for more than four decades now.

But a court order has spread panic in the transporters’ circles. On December 18, the Sindh High Court directed the provincial transport department to devise a system for public and private transport vehicles’ fitness examination and age tests. But the transporters know most of their vehicles would fail the age-limit tests if the government acts on the court order.



The government stopped issuing new route permits for buses or minibuses in Karachi after the tragic Bushra Zaidi case in 1985, said Muhammad Ilyas, the joint secretary of Karachi Bus Owners Association (KBOA). Since then, no new buses have been brought into the public transport fleet by private transporters.

“If operating buses and minibuses are banned, there will be no public transport.  The government has done nothing to bring in new vehicles,” complained Ilyas, who has been associated with the transport business in Karachi for the past 30 years.

The city needs between 25,000 and 30,000 new buses to cater to the population, according to estimates. Up to three years ago, there were around 18,000 buses, minibuses and coaches, which were still not enough. The number has dropped to 12,000 now while the population has increased, said Ilyas.

Going by the Motor Vehicle Ordinance, the current fleet of public transport buses is unfit to be used but the transporters or the Sindh government has no other alternative.

Karachi Transport Ittehad’s Tawab Khan said they have yet to receive any directions from the transport department on vehicle age-limits. “We will withdraw our vehicles but where will the people go? No new vehicles have been brought in since 2003 and only reconditioned coaches are being used,” he said.

A public transport vehicle can operate for 10 years if it has the road fitness certificate issued by the traffic police’s motor vehicle inspection branch, an official of the Sindh Transport Department told The Express Tribune. The Sindh government has no other option if the current fleet of buses is banned on the basis of age as they indeed are decades old, he added.

“Before applying the age-limit stipulation, all buses, minibuses and coaches will have to be stopped if their fitness is to be checked in the true sense,” he said. “By ‘fitness’, it does not mean that you can bring your decades-old, smoke emitting vehicle on the road just because its engine can pull it.”

The transport department has yet to receive directions from the court to determine the age-limit but will take action according to the court order, assured transport deputy secretary Ali Nawaz Panhwar.

The department is trying to bring in new vehicles into the public transport sector with public-private partnership. “We plan to bring 10,000 new buses to the city for public transportation when we ban the decades-old buses,” Panhwar said.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 29^th, 2013.