Establishing a bus ITS service for Pune

As part of Prosperity Fund allotments, Steer was appointed by the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (FCO) of the UK to provide ‘support to Pune Municipal Corporation, Govt. of Maharashtra in developing an implementation and procurement strategy for deploying intelligent Transport System for Public buses in Pune.’

The objective of this commission was to produce an ITS implementation strategy and procurement guide that PMC can use as the basis for the specifications that they will develop to procure their own bus ITS systems.

We staged this project in the following steps:

1. Understanding the existing state of play: at the time of study, Pune already had some city-level ITS systems like surveillance, traffic control etc installed.

2. Guidance on how to develop a plan for Passenger Information Systems: we described methods on how to collect passenger data and how to apply it in providing:

• Pre-journey information
• In-journey information
• Last-mile information

The methods described by us focused on providing information which would be continuous, consistent, timely, accessible and easy to understand.

3. Development of ITS architecture: this exercise provided the following:

• Overall scope of Bus ITS service;
• The architecture and key components for the desired service;
• Functional requirements of the service;
• A gap analysis to compare existing systems against desired service;
• Set of actions to realise the desired service.

4. Procurement approach: the final step was to provide a strategy for optimising the implementation of ITS system.

Our recommendations were very well received and appreciated.