ExpertDabbler

I was walking on Velachery Main Road this morning and could not help but notice the route number boards in our MTC buses.

The first bus was  some 21 series. 21H if I remember correctly. On the left hand side of the board was written ‘Broadway’ and on the right it had ‘Madipakkam’. I was confused until I realized the bus was going towards Guindy from Vijaynagar terminus. Which means in all probability it’s proceeding from Madipakkam to Broadway. I could figure this out since I am very much a Chennai vasi and I know the directions and locations of  well-known suburbs. I bet someone new to the city would’ve got into the bus thinking it would go to Madipakkam.

I got more curious and started to notice all the other buses which passed through namely in the next 5 minutes -  D70, 5A to name a few.

From what I observed today morning and previously, I think there are 3 types of boards - One with destinations written on left/right style one with destinations written on top/bottom  and lastly, some cut services which will have just a ‘TO’ Destination which is cearly struck off to indicate its a cut service.

All said and done, the best way for the boards is to display only the TO destination along with the route in much bigger font. To my mind, there is no use for ‘FROM’. But the ideas of the MTC folks seem to be funny, at best.

Except for those hailing from middle-east, the rest of the junta read from left to right. So if at all one wants the ‘FROM’ it makes sense to have it on the left and ‘TO’ on the right.

Alternatively, we can have the ‘FROM’ on the top of the board and ‘TO’ below.

Worse, we can assume all of us are from middle east and reverse it, uniformly!

But what the MTC folks have is the worst possible option - there are all types of boards with total disregard for consistency. One bus has the ‘FROM’ on the left while the rest have it on the right. I bet even those who can read Tamil and who is very much a chennai vasi will get coufused once in a while if he or she is not aware of the locations of the suburbs.

The less said about the plight of those new to the city and language, the better. Add our ‘friendly’ autrorickshaws to the equation and their ordeal looks scary enough for them to decide never to visit Chennai again in their lifetime.

I am basically a ‘tubelight’, if it can strike me, it can strike anyone whose voice matter in MTC. But then mysterious are the ways of MTC!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 1:37 am and is filed under chennai. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.