How to travel in and out of IIT Guwahati effectively?
A suggestion to improve the current transportation system of IIT Guwahati.
The Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati is located on the outskirts of the city of Guwahati at a distance of around 20 km from Guwahati railway station and around 20 km from the Lokapriya Gopinath Bordoloi airport. Taxis, buses, and auto-rickshaws are available to reach the IIT Guwahati campus from the airport, the railway station and other parts of the city.
IIT Guwahati has its own bus service that operates between the IITG campus and the bus stop Panbazar, Guwahati. This to and from bus service is widely used by the college students and staff to travel to and from the city. The first bus starts at 8:00 am from campus to city and 6:45 am from the city to campus. The last bus from city to campus is at 8:55 pm and from IITG campus to city is at 9:35 pm.
IIT Guwahati also has internal bus services within the campus for commuting within the premises. These internal buses follow 5 different routes which are as follow:
Though having all the transportation facilities at the campus students and staff faces many problems while traveling to and from the city to campus, such as:
No real-time bus update: There is a list of bus timing is available at Hello IITG mobile application, but there is not real time update about the current location of the bus. This many a times causes a lot of issues to the commutators, keeps on waiting for the bus and they have no clue when the bus will come.
Concerned about seat availability: After waiting long for the bus commutators many times don’t get seats in rush hour. They have any clue about the rush on the bus that they will be going to take.
Collaboration with friends: Students at the campus mostly travels in a group, and staying at different hostels and collaborating about their travel and catching a bus at the same time become problematic sometimes. In that scenario, they sometimes end up missing their buses.
Bus identification is difficult: IIT G buses are white and green in color and has a small tag over it, which is not much visible from distance. When commutators have to catch a bus from city to campus, it becomes really difficult to identify the IIT G bus among lots of buses on road.
Solution to all problems may be solved just by putting a mobile phone with internet in the bus to track its GPS location and connecting it to the IITG bus tracking mobile platform and get their boarding status as input from the commutators who will be traveling by that bus, to provide tentative rush in the bus. Also allowing the IIT G commutators to share their travel plan among their friends to keep them updated and in touch with the trip.
While coming up with this solution it has been assumed that commutators have smartphones and they generally use an application such as google maps, Ola, Uber etc.
To show this system a small scenario has been made in which a student of IIT Guwahati is planning to visit Fancy Bazar, Guwahati with her friends.
Thank you!
