IT’S Saturday evening, usually a dull time in the city of bureaucrats. Offices are closed, shops have few customers. I arrive at the Stock Exchange station of the recently inaugurated Metro Bus, where two policemen sit at the entrance.

Beyond, it’s a different world: glittering brown marble stairs and escalators going down to the ticketing window, a cleaner standing at the ready. Here, under the main Jinnah Avenue of the capital’s Blue Area, there are fancy lights, gloss and shine. A sign points towards a lift, reserved for the disabled. I go and push the button, but it doesn’t work. The cleaner tells me that the lift is not yet in operation; “There’s some issue with the cables.”

Three people are buying the Rs20 tickets and inquiring as to how the plastic tokens are used. The ticketing window clerk explains the method to every customer and also informs them that they can purchase a permanent card for Rs130 that can be used repeatedly and recharged. A few yards further, an automated machine produces the long-duration cards and recharges credit on them. A worker deputed there tells people how to insert the money and scan the card.

Signs tell me where the passenger lounge is upstairs and where the exit is located. I go towards the passenger lounge which opens on both ends of the metro bus bays. A restricted entrance gate stops me: a staff member tells me to scan my token and the chrome bars softly revolve to let me pass.

A few passengers are waiting inside, some fetching water from an electric water cooler installed near one of the glass walls of this red-themed station, others sitting on the shining metal benches (too hard to sit on for a long time).

A woman in her early 30s, with an infant and a toddler, dismounts from a bus coming from Rawalpindi. She smiles as she enters the lounge, her face quite fresh. “I have come to Islamabad to visit my sister,” Uzma Fahim tells me. “The ride was very fascinating. Before the Metro, I used to come on a motorbike with a relative. I had to bother somebody to bring me. Now, it’s so easy.”

A policeman approaches me. “This is a very good service, but people are misusing it,” says Zaheer-ul-Hassan. “Thousands of youngsters come daily without any purpose and create extra rush. They also harass women. Many of them don’t exit the station and buy a new ticket, they just board another bus. The token’s validity is two hours.”

A red bus arrives from the Secretariat side, its seats already full and many of the passengers standing. I step in.

A recording informs us, “Next station — Centaurus,” first in English and then in Urdu.

“This service saves me time,” Muhammad Kamran, a travel agent, tells me. “I’m a frequent traveller between the twin cities and earlier, I had to spend hours in the vans. Now, I can get to Saddar from the Secretariat [the termination points of the Metro] in just 50 minutes. It is of international standards, no doubt.”

His mobile phone rings: “Okay, I’ll check my email,” he tells the caller, and opens the browser on his smartphone. “Oh, the Wi-Fi is not working! Shahbaz Sharif had announced that it will work in the bus,” he exclaims. A teenager standing nearby also checks his phone. “It’s not working.”

As we approach a station, though, the Wi-Fi comes online.

The bus passes through the tunnels and over bridges. In Pindi, it traverses the length of Murree Road in the heart of the city via overhead bridge, affording an eye-catching view.

Passengers continue boarding, overloading the bus. The atmosphere becomes suffocating despite the air conditioning which had been working efficiently earlier.

The lounge at the Saddar terminal is jam-packed, too, and it’s intensely suffocating because no air conditioners have been installed yet. In long queues, people wait to cross the entry/exit points. It takes me 10 minutes to reach the gate, even though it’s just 10 yards away. The queues are moving slowly because people don’t know how to use the tokens.

At the ticketing window here, hundreds of people are lined up; the queue goes out of the station, all the way to the main road.

On my way back, I find a seat. Muhammad Shareef, a guard at the Centaurus Mall, joins me at Rawalpindi’s Committee Chowk/Raja Bazaar station.

“The vans plying Murree Road took two hours to reach Raja Bazaar,” he confides. “They charged Rs60. The Metro takes me there within 30 minutes and for only Rs20. But the rush is huge. The government must do something to cope with it.”

For Hanif Abbasi, chairman of the Metro Bus project committee, the rush of people is encouraging and a feature of metros the world over.

“We will soon start a shuttle service from all areas in the twin cities to facilitate people in reaching the Metro stations easily,” he says. “Yesterday, 166,000 people travelled in 68 buses. This is a great success. The Wi-Fi is also working in the buses and minor technical issues will be removed soon. The response of the public is great.”

Published in Dawn, June 21st, 2015

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