[Cover Story] MTC travel costing a rupee more

Now, traveling in MTC is costing more for me

As a regular passenger of chennai's MTC , now a days i am spending more for the ticket fare. The reason is not a hike in ticket fare but the addition of different types of bus services . For my daily commute to my office in guindy I usually take the 170c bus service from anna nagar west, which used to be a white board costing Rs.4/- between anna nagar and guindy. Now i am wondering why the ticket fare is a rupee extra (Rs 5/-) for the same distance.

Many of us can think what matters if the ticket is just one rupee extra, but that 2 rupee extra for to and fro ticket adds up to Rs. 50/- monthly, which really concerns people who travel regularly. Anyway i was very curious to know why the ticket is costlier now. The MTC website shows up a different service called "M" service, which has flat rates of 3,5,7 and 9 which i think is the reason for this. The next day i could notice just a letter "M" added in the white board as "M170c". This is really clever that most people wouldn't notice this letter added, as usually people board the bus looking at the color of the board and they have to pay a rupee extra.

Adding up new services is surly a good move, but they shouldn't have reduced the regular services. I could see more yellow line and blue line buses, which costs double than the regular service. Making these services more frequent in peak hour would obviously make more profit to MTC, but puts the burden on the common man.

Instead of directly hiking the ticket fares they have reduced the regular service and made our traveling costlier.