Recently have been to quite a few cities across india, and finally in chennai after a long gap. Noticed quite a few changes while entering the city, the clover shaped flyovers of Kathipara junction and quite a number of one ways in the arterial road, but nothing as much striking as the MTC's fleet of new buses.Most of the buses in the city are Deluxe and Ultra Deluxe with quite a number of Volvo buses plying within the City.
The buses are surprisingly very comfortable and uncharacteristically well maintained, compared to the fleet back in early 2000 this is a huge change.Almost 90% of the buses are supplied by Ashok Leyland and rest by tata and Volvo India.
it appeared most of the buses are new and very few old buses were seen,so I wanted to find more details on how chennai mtc does this, whereas other major Indian cities like Mumbai,bangalore,Delhi and Kolkata are struggling with their ageing and rickety fleets.
MTC has been doing aggressive shopping in terms of buses over the last 5 years, In 2008-09 season the mean average of a MTC bus was 3.59 years and now till September 2009 it is 4.08 years. In 2008, MTC acquired 1139 new buses and in 2009 (till Sep) it acquired 732 new buses.
Chennai MTC carries 50 lakh Passengers daily has a fleet of 3257 buses as of Sep 2009.
Below is the chart of MTC Bus efficiency as per Chennai MTC website (http://www.mtcbus.org/)
And whats more they have few buses for hire service as well, you can visit MTC website or call 044 – 23455846 / 23455858 / 23455859 for your private trips as well. Many of the corporates are booking these buses for their team outings so do note down these numbers if you are in Chennai.