SMART move?
The BEST has introduced a SMART card. The first part is fiction, the second part is plastic.
For 1200 bucks a month, the BEST lets you get onto any bus anywhere, any time. Now if they came up with movie tickets like that I know that there would be takers.
Nonetheless, the economists of the BEST who also double up as conductors seem to have seen something that most consumers haven’t. Hence the only people who have bought the cards are these people and their kith and kin. At a more serious level, 1200 or even the 800 bucks a month option is simply a big loser to the other 12 rake mammoth that easily picks up 5000 people at a time and deposits them the other side of town in half the time. So what if you get badly crushed and start smelling like sardines….the BEST is not aroma-therapeutic either. And on bad days you could end up having two meals on the bus if not three, given traffic and more traffic.
The card is hardly SMART. The conductor has a contraption which still needs to do a stethoscope like reading of your card. This takes about half a minute. It involves punching some numbers into the reader and then seeing if the expiry date’s gone by This in spite of your card having your nincompoop like passport size photograph, the date, time and multiple stamps of all BEST authorities (all ‘concerned’ authorities). A train pass is much simpler and no wonder has much more takers. Thus the conductor who now has to additionally assuage his conscience by monitoring SMART cards ends up spending more time that he actually would punching tickets. What’s worse is imagining him doing this to a packed bus of 100 people (with a slated capacity of 60 needless to say). The smarter ones might just call attendance and do a ‘please raise your hands if you have a pass’ routine.
The beauty of the BEST is its ubiquity. The SMART card might work if it can get as smart as the Mumbaikar!
For 1200 bucks a month, the BEST lets you get onto any bus anywhere, any time. Now if they came up with movie tickets like that I know that there would be takers.
Nonetheless, the economists of the BEST who also double up as conductors seem to have seen something that most consumers haven’t. Hence the only people who have bought the cards are these people and their kith and kin. At a more serious level, 1200 or even the 800 bucks a month option is simply a big loser to the other 12 rake mammoth that easily picks up 5000 people at a time and deposits them the other side of town in half the time. So what if you get badly crushed and start smelling like sardines….the BEST is not aroma-therapeutic either. And on bad days you could end up having two meals on the bus if not three, given traffic and more traffic.
The card is hardly SMART. The conductor has a contraption which still needs to do a stethoscope like reading of your card. This takes about half a minute. It involves punching some numbers into the reader and then seeing if the expiry date’s gone by This in spite of your card having your nincompoop like passport size photograph, the date, time and multiple stamps of all BEST authorities (all ‘concerned’ authorities). A train pass is much simpler and no wonder has much more takers. Thus the conductor who now has to additionally assuage his conscience by monitoring SMART cards ends up spending more time that he actually would punching tickets. What’s worse is imagining him doing this to a packed bus of 100 people (with a slated capacity of 60 needless to say). The smarter ones might just call attendance and do a ‘please raise your hands if you have a pass’ routine.
The beauty of the BEST is its ubiquity. The SMART card might work if it can get as smart as the Mumbaikar!
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