Every morning, from the very beginning of the rush hour, traffic piles up on the Kotte-Bope Road, leading into the Athurugiriya town centre. This occurs because of private buses taking up the entire road in backing into the Athurugiriya bus stand. The location of the bus stand, close to the junction of the Kaduwela Road and the Kotte-Bope Road, is not helpful – leading to the blockage of two streams of traffic in the Colombo-ward direction.
The buses need the road to manoeuvre into the parking position, because up to 20 buses occupy the bus stand, originally designed for a maximum of four buses. When only Ceylon Transport Board (CTB) buses used the bus stand, it did not need a multiplicity of parking places – the buses would arrive, load passengers and start their journey to Colombo quickly. Only buses belonging to the 170 route, which starts out from Athurugiriya, required parking there, awaiting their turn. However, turnaround was swift.
Now, of course, like many of its counterparts the island over, the Athurugiriya bus stand is the exclusive domain of private buses. Sri Lanka Transport Board (SLTB- successor to the CTB) buses pick up passengers from the road, not from the bus stand.
The reason why so many private buses need to park at the stand lies in the very nature of private bus services in Sri Lanka. Ideally, to provide a proper service, the buses should take off in quick succession, so only two or three need remain parked at any given time.
However, the bus crews need to make a profit, which means they must pack the bus to overflowing. They cannot do so if they follow a timetable made with the welfare of passengers in mind. So, instead of quick turnaround the buses wait for a long interval before taking off.
This situation replicates itself at bus stands all over the country. The slower turnaround time means a much less efficient use of capital, although the return on that capital is high in purely monetary terms.
The profit motive leads to other disadvantages. There is severe competition between private bus crews, as each attempt to poach passengers from either the preceding or the following bus, or from SLTB buses, by either driving excessively fast or excessively slowly. The latter makes passengers late, while the former can lead to accidents – also being extremely uncomfortable for the already squashed passengers.
This also has its disadvantages for employers. Employees arrive at work exhausted, which does not make for an efficiently-run organisation. Some companies provide dedicated buses to transport employees to and from work.
The over-zealous packing of buses also makes life easier for perverts, who prey on female passengers. Bus travel has become a nightmare for women, in the face of almost invariable sexual harassment. Thus, women arrive at work both tired and agitated.
The better-off women look for other alternatives. One mid-level bank executive says that she moved to (more expensive) accommodation in Colombo, because she could no longer bear the toxic masculine persecution on buses. Others travel to work in office vans.
However, most of the growing female portion of the workforce have only one alternative, which is the SLTB. These buses, being crewed by trained full-time workers, enable them to travel in some level of comfort. Unlike private bus operators, who live day-to-day on takings from passengers, SLTB crews can look forward to a guaranteed monthly wage packet, so they do not need to pack their buses. They also have less patience with sexual harassment than private bus operators.
“In Jaffna, women only travel in CTB buses,” says a teacher from Point Pedro. She reports that toxic masculinity has an even higher incidence in the Peninsula than in Colombo.
However, across the board, both male and female commuters prefer to travel on SLTB buses, rather than by private bus.
The profit motive has another disadvantage. In CTB days, buses would run up to railway stations, trains feeding buses, and vice versa. Railway lines run towards the urban centres, while buses enabled lateral travel. It makes far more sense, given traffic congestion, to maximise the use of the railways to transport commuters into the city.
Private bus crews do not want to lose passengers to trains, and prefer to run towards the centre. Hence, for example in Homagama, the construction of a purpose-built bus stand at the railway station only benefitted commuters on the 128 route.
Train commuters wishing to get on a bus running elsewhere must walk all the way to the High Level Road, or even further, to the new bus stand, about one kilometre away. Conversely, morning commuters must run all the way from the High Level Road to the railway station.
Another disadvantage is that there are few night services. A vibrant service economy, such as Sri Lanka aims to be, needs employees to be able to get to and from work at night. Smaller businesses cannot afford to provide transport for these employees.
In the days of the CTB, some bus routes ran for 20 hours of the day, only taking a break in the wee hours of the morning. Nowadays, after the rush hour, apart from a few private buses, only SLTB buses are available.
Running private and SLTB buses to a joint schedule has been presented as a solution to the transport crisis. However, SLTB sources say that this would simply mean a replication of the private bus takeover of CTB bus stands: them getting the lion’s share of running slots during the lucrative rush hours, with SLTB buses relegated to the leaner and less profitable ones.
Thus, running private and SLTB buses on a single schedule would tend to disadvantage passengers, since the former outnumber the latter by about tenfold – even more, on the more lucrative routes.
The attraction of SLTB services causes private bus operators to take drastic action. Concerted efforts to thwart SLTB services include, reportedly, mobile-phone based communications to enable private buses to run just ahead of SLTB buses, and outright bribing of SLTB crews.
Evidence appeared recently that the competition had intensified a notch, with brazen attacks on SLTB vehicles, including spreading bent nails to puncture their tyres, on mountain roads, and incidents of stoning. This suggests that private buses have reverted to the worst conditions prior to nationalisation in 1958.
Most commuters would prefer the SLTB to be beefed up at the expense of private buses. However, this is no easy task, especially considering the rate at which the SLTB must be subsidised under current conditions.
The SLTB needs to cut its costs as much as possible, for which it needs to deploy all its human and technological resources.