Hyderabad: Hyderabad Metro, which successfully completed its first month of commercial operations on Friday, saw an average of 100,000 passengers a day.
Hyderabad Metro Rail Ltd. managing director NVS Reddy told a media conference that so far 3.2 million people have used the service in the past 30 days on Miyapur-Ameerpet and Ameerpet-Nagole routes.
Admitting that there were still a few hiccups in the running of the metro, Reddy said that several new measures were afoot to further improve facilities at stations for commuters. “Parking facility is now available at 23 stations and only at Prakash Nagar station it was not available at the moment,” he said.
He also announced a plan for tenders to be issued soon, for the operation of toilets and for maintenance work at stations. “We will also come up with a computerised smart parking system,” he said.
Reddy also recalled naysayers who said if Telangana state was formed, the Hyderabad Metro project would get stuck.
About the use of Smart Cards by commuters to buy the tickets, Reddy said, so far 1,50,000 smart cards had been sold, with on avagerage 1,000 more cards being sold. “About 22 per cent of the passengers were using the smart cards to travel by Metro,” he said.
Trends further proved that people preferred to travel long distances using the facility: more people were noted using the four big stations in the city — Miyapur, Ameerpet, Uppal and Nagole — than smaller stations.
About the extension of the Metro service to other routes, he said, the work on Ameerpet to LB Nagar on Corridor I will be completed before next June. The Ameerpet to Hitech route on Corridor III is also scheduled to start running around the same time. The plan was to have a trial run of Metro on these routes in third week of June and open service to the public in the fourth week of the month.
Once the project is completed on all the three corridors, it will have the capacity to carry 1.5 million people every day.
