Commuters using the Metro Bus service are facing long queues to buy tickets at stations because of a shortage of tokens issued for single journeys.
The tokens are fitted with RFID chips and are meant to be deposited in containers set up at each bus station at the end of the journey. But many travellers have been pocketing the tokens, either as a memento or by accident, resulting in a shortage, said officials with Inbox, the company handling the ticketing system.
“Some people have started using the tokens as key chains,” said an official. A token costs Rs140, but is “rented” to travellers on single journeys for Rs20, he said.
Meanwhile, the shortage of tokens has resulted in a surge in sales of Metro Bus smart cards, which users can top up with credit when needed. An Inbox official said that the use of smart cards for journeys had risen from 10,000 to 30,000 in the last two months. The company has sold around 50,000 cards, but only 30,000 are in use.
The Punjab Metro Bus Authority had already decided to phase out tokens altogether, once card-reading swipe machines are introduced on other bus services so Metro cards can be used across the city.
Inbox expects the use of cards to increase further in the coming months, particularly in view of the long queues at stations. The company has a stock of 40,000 tokens. When tokens run out at a station, tokens from other stations have to be brought in.
Some Metro users speculated that the queues were part of a strategy to get people to buy more cards. Nabeel Aslam from Ichhra, who uses the Shama station, said that he had only bought a Metro card because of long queues. But the card did make travelling much simpler as he did not have to queue up to buy a token every time, he added.
Adnan Afzal, assistant operations manager at Inbox, said that he believed that card sales had increased because of clever marketing. He said commuter traffic levels changed throughout the day so tokens were rotated between various stations. He said that sometimes there were token shortages resulting in long queues, but this could not be helped. He denied that allowing long queues to build was a deliberate strategy to get people to buy cards.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 10th, 2013.