BCIL's survey on Bangalore car commuters

BCIL recently conducted a survey among car owners who commute to work to find out whether they would be willing to consider a public transport alternative.

They have released the report (executive summary in fact) and it does have some useful insights. You can see the press release here, the executive summary PPT is available here and here is TOI's coverage.

Here are some random highlights I noticed from this study: (Numbers in square brackets [] refer to the slide number in the PPT)

* 78% of car users do not car pool [21] mostly because they dont have colleagues who live nearby or they prefer travelling along [24].
* 52% of all car users do not want to commute by bus [25] but 70% hope to use Metro [28].
* The non-car-poolers also do not consider buses because they are crowded, infrequent and the routes are not good. [27]
* 57% of all people said they would use buses if the service was improved [29]
* Of the people who do car pool, 83% think it is convenient [21] and 57% have been pooling for more than 2 years [20].

It is reassuring to find that most of the numbers in fact validate the opinions being aired here on praja.

The low hanging fruit seems to be that of non-poolers. If a suitable incentive is provided for people to carpool, that should reduce the number of cars on road significantly. Also there is a need for an easy to use tool to schedule car pools easily. Last year Commute Easy was launched with support from Bangalore Traffic Police. I am not sure how successful it has been. We dont get to hear of it often so I presume it could use some awareness campaigns.

The next thing seems to be of improving the BMTC routes and frequencies. There have been various suggestions on Praja on this and I hope the Transportation WG would take these to the relevant people as we go.

What do you think of these statistics? Based on the trend shown, how else do you think we can incentivise the use of public transport?