Resh­ma Ra­goonath

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The long-await­ed com­pressed nat­ur­al gas (CNG) pow­ered Sun­long bus­es have fi­nal­ly hit the streets, even though the Pub­lic Trans­port Ser­vice Com­pa­ny (PTSC) is still await­ing ap­proval for its re­fu­elling sta­tion.

On Fri­day Carl Ramdeo, deputy gen­er­al man­ag­er of PTSC, mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions, in a tele­phone in­ter­view, said all 35 bus­es, pur­chased at a cost of $38 mil­lion from Chi­na last year, were added to the cor­po­ra­tion's routes.

He said 20 of the bus­es were added to the routes last Thurs­day and the re­main­ing 15 were put in­to cir­cu­la­tion on Fri­day.

"The bus­es will be run­ning East to West and North to South. The fares for us­ing the bus­es will be the same fares be­tween $4 and $6, de­pend­ing on the route. The fees did not change," he said.

He said the bus­es, five ar­tic­u­lat­ed, 15 reg­u­lar large and 15 medi­um-sized, all have on-board cam­eras for safe­ty.

Ramdeo said PTSC was still wait­ing for fi­nal ap­proval from the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny on its CNG re­fu­elling sta­tion at South Quay.

In the in­ter­im, he said, PTSC was us­ing pri­vate CNG re­fu­elling sta­tions.

NGC, he said, was sort­ing out the pa­per work with the fu­elling sta­tion.

"We an­tic­i­pate that with­in an­oth­er week we should have the re­fu­elling sta­tion at PTSC ready but in the mean­time we are us­ing the pri­vate fu­elling sta­tions," he added.

Ramdeo said the re­sponse from the pub­lic about the new bus­es had been pleas­ing.

"The feed­back has been very, very good in terms of the seat­ing, the ca­pac­i­ty.

"Peo­ple are hap­py that there are cam­eras on board and they are able to see the speed in kilo­me­tres that the dri­ver is dri­ving at.

"It is a re­al­ly good ex­pe­ri­ence a lot of com­muters," Ramdeo added.

He said the bus­es were very pow­er­ful with the CNG fu­el and they were very ef­fi­cient.

CNG-pow­ered bus­es use a clean­er fu­el which will be more cost ef­fec­tive for main­te­nance.