Green Travel Initiatives: Creating sustainable public transportation

Objective

Promote more people to use public bus transport.

Challenges

• Cannot increase fleet to meet travel demand
• Crumbling infrastructure
• High operational costs
• Inadequate/ageing fleet that guzzles fuel
• Lack of commuter-centric service
• Lack of funds
• Low supply
• Not able to adapt to new technology
• Passengers shifting to other modes of transport

All of this has a knock-on effect on mobility, pollution, congestion, and fuel consumption. Given this, there’s a need to devise a system to reduce Capex for the procurement of buses, reduce bus operational/maintenance cost, reduce dependency on fossil fuels by adopting improvements made in Green Technology, and also to reduce the bus driver’s stress to improve efficiency.

We are leading a 360 degree approach towards green travel. This means converting diesel/CNG buses to electric buses, deploying buses on GCC, and creating the largest fleet of 410 electric buses in India.

We aim for 50% fleet electrification by December 2023 and 100% by March 2026. At the same time, our fleet will double to 7000 by 2023 and grow to 10,000 by 2026. As well, we are using 700MW of Solar Energy and instituting 330 public electric vehicle charging points. Plus, we are rationalising routes and improving the BEST Chalo App to provide live location of buses/ETA of buses, display bus occupancy and allow for digital ticketing/purchasing of passes.

We have introduced India’s first National Common Mobility Card by any city/state transport operator, including zero emission e-scooters for last mile connectivity. That makes BEST India’s first premium electric bus service, and India’s first and only 100% digital bus fleet. In short, BEST is the first city transport operator in India to implement MaaS.