Disregarding SOPs as ‘impractical’, public transport returns to roads

By Oonib Azam
June 04, 2020

For more than two months public transport and ride-hailing services remained suspended across Sindh as part of the preventive lockdown against local transmission of the novel coronavirus. On Tuesday the provincial government finally allowed resuming these services. The result, however, was quite contrary to what was expected, as one could not see many public vehicles plying Karachi’s roads on Wednesday.

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The standard operating procedures (SOPs) issued by the Sindh Transport & Mass Transit Department for the resumption of public transport and ride-hailing services was considered a joke, as bus drivers and conductors termed them “completely impractical”. While masks and gloves were spotted on a few public vehicles, the passengers largely remained oblivious to and nonchalant about the SOPs.

The conductor of a G-7 public bus at Nipa was seen loading his vehicle with passengers without a mask. When asked about it, he replied that he didn’t have it. “One feels suffocated in a mask all day long, and getting off and on the bus,” he said, adding that he had been washing his hands and would wash the bus after completing the route.

Addressing a news conference a day earlier, Sindh Transport Minister Syed Awais Qadir Shah had ordered compliance with the SOPs issued by his department to protect the public from COVID-19. He had warned that public transport services would be suspended again if anyone was found to be violating the precautionary measures.

The SOPs issued by the transport department include cleaning and disinfecting the surfaces of buses, bus terminals and waiting areas. It asks observing social distancing during ticketing, boarding, travelling and disembarking with a minimum of three-foot distance.

Wearing masks and hand gloves is mandatory for all passengers, drivers and conductors. The body temperature of every passenger as well as that of the driver and conductor needs to be checked before any of them board the bus.

Public vehicles are to allow occupancy of only 50 per cent of the seats, with a reasonable distance between every two passengers. The rear door is to used to board the bus and the front to disembark.

When asked about these SOPs, the G-7 bus conductor laughed and said the bus was not plying the road in Dubai. He wondered how it would be possible from them to check the body temperature of every passenger.

Karachi Transport Ittehad (KTI) Vice President Tawab Khan didn’t even know that they were supposed to check the body temperature of every passenger. When asked to comment on the matter, he also laughed, saying that conductors were illiterate, so “they can’t check people’s body temperature”.

Khan claimed that they didn’t have any such agreement with the government. “It was for intercity transport,” he said, adding that they were supposed to carry passengers seat by seat. As for the passengers, he said they could only ask them to wear masks but never force them.

He also said that it would take them a day or two to start running their buses to maximum capacity. “For the past two and a half months our buses haven’t been operating,” he said, explaining that it would take them three or four days to get the vehicles cleaned and their oil changed. From Friday, he said, around 8,000 buses would be plying the city’s roads.

Marwat Coach Service owner Rab Nawaz said that only 70 of their 150 buses had plied the roads on Wednesday. “The tyres of most of the buses need to be changed, and for that we need cash,” he said, adding that most of his drivers and conductors had gone to their villages during the lockdown and for Eid.

“We will need some time before being able to bring all our buses back on the roads,” he said. When asked about the SOPs, he said he was making sure that all his drivers wore masks and gloves as well as kept disinfectants and hand sanitisers with them.

Regional Transport Authority Director Nazeer Hussain also said that not 100 per cent of the intracity transport ran on Wednesday. He inspected public buses at University Road near Old Sabzi Mandi and at District West’s Habib Bank Chowrangi. Most of the drivers and conductors, he said, were wearing masks and gloves.

“I have called a meeting with the KTI at my office at 2pm on Thursday [today] for the implementation of the SOPs,” he said. The traffic police, he pointed out, had also been taken on board and would make sure that the SOPs were complied with.

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