Gurugram bus service introduces new route from Huda City Centre to Badshahpur

The Gurugram Metropolitan City Bus Limited (GMCBL) launched the Gurugram bus service’s sixth route on Tuesday.

Officially numbered as Route 111, it will run from Badshahpur to Huda City Centre — a distance of 10.5 kilometres — with a flat ticket price of ₹10. This route is the shortest to be launched by the GMCBL yet and was flagged off by deputy commissioner Amit Khatri at noon from Badshahpur. For this new route, the GMCBL has acquired six more buses, which will ply at intervals of 15 minutes, starting at 7.15am and ending at 10.15pm from Badshahpur, and beginning at 6.30am and ending at 9.30pm from Huda City Centre. The route will also allow ticketless travel for children under 12 years of age. The total strength of the service’s fleet now stands at 81 buses.

The bus service has five remaining routes, which are yet to launch as part of its first phase. They are expected to be rolled out over the next six months, said GMCBL officials on Tuesday.

Arun Sharma, general manager, GMCBL, revealed that the next route will be an intercity one, between Gurugram and Faridabad.

“The idea has been under consideration for some time now. We are still working out some of the finer details,” he said. Last month, the Gurugaman service launched two new routes from Ambience Mall to Sector 10 (Route 132), and from Tau Devi Lal Biodiversity Park to Dwarka Expressway (Route 116). Earlier, in February, the third route from Dundahera to Harsuru was launched.

Data shared by the GMCBL shows that there has been a 37% increase in the service’s average ridership between March and April, which officials have attributed to the addition of these new routes.Until March, the average daily ridership of the bus service stood at a little below 20,000 passengers per day that by April-end had risen to more than 25,000 riders per day. On average, the service has added close to 5,000 daily commuters between March and April.

However, a bus systems expert at Delhi Integrated Multi-Modal Transit System (DIMTS) Ltd, who did not wish to be quoted due to his involvement with the GMCBL project, said that this increase was not particularly significant. “If you have an increase of 5,000 people overall due to the addition of three new routes, it means that each of the new routes has only gathered a ridership of around 1,500 people per day. This is a poor indicator of how much of the service is being used by the population,” the official said.