The new airport in Bangalore is almost complete, but the connectivity to the city is a total mess. The proposed expressway is mired in litigation. There is no rail link to the airport. The existing highway (Bellary Road) is already a mess and will only get worse when the airport opens.
BMTC is planning to launch a Volvo service from various points in the city. They plan 40 buses in total, which I think will be inadequate. Here's my reasoning. The buses will only run at hourly intervals. I think they will find it difficult to live up to, considering that they only have 5 buses from each location and the round trip to the airport may easily exceed that during peak hours, but . Assuming a 4 hour round trip, each bus carrying out 6 trips per day and a capacity of 50 passengers per bus, this just works out to 24000 people who will be able to use the service (40 buses x 6 trips x 50 passengers x 2) at peak capacity. With a projected 50000 passengers per day expected to use the airport daily, that's just half the number. The problem gets worse when you consider that the traffic will not be uniform, the peak hours traffic (6-9 am and 5-9pm) could easily double.
BMTC has also taken a stupid decision to have multiple stops for each service. I don't know what they were smoking when they came up with this brainwave. Not only will the stops increase the travel time tremendously (remember we are talking about passengers with a lot of luggage here), but very likely the buses are going to be full at the starting point itself, making the stops meaningless.
Despite these issues, I still think this is the best solution, both for the short and long term. Let's hope they fine tune this, increase the number of buses to 100 and price it competitively (around 250 per passenger).
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