Changing Incentives for Delhi’s Buses

By Bhavya Khanna

With the paucity of children falling down borewells and celebrity lip locks these days, the media seems to have taken a keen interest in Blue Line Bus tragedies of late. The truth is that they’ve happened for as long as I can remember, and account for a healthy proportion of road deaths inside of Delhi.

The reasons behind the deaths are simple and have been stated time and again. Blue Line buses and their drivers have scant regard for traffic rules and often speed so as to overtake competing buses on similar routes so as to pick up the maximum number of passengers. Added to this, buses rarely obey traffic rules, speed and change lanes with wild abandon. Buses are also overpacked, and pose a safety risk for passengers on board.

What however has not been looked into is the reason behind this overly boisterous behavior of buses. The incentives for small privately owned Blue Line Bus contractors are perverted. The bus drivers and conductors are paid on a per fare basis, and as a result both are incentivized to pick up as many passengers as possible. Additionally, due to the owner structure of most blue line buses, where buses are owned by individuals or small groups of contractors or occasionally the driver himself; there is little or no incentive to create and sustain a brand. Additionally, as ownership is small and not corporate, an injured party finds it hard to sue or file criminal charges of negligence, as the cost of doing so far outweighs and gains of compensation that such a party could receive.

To solve this problem, the Delhi Government has proposed phasing out private bus lines in two years time, for favor of newer speed controlled buses. However, without changing incentives for both drivers and companies, no regulation will work as drivers and owners will find ways around them.

Two suggestions spring to mind. One, for corporatizing bus services in Delhi city, and disallowing small 1-5 bus fleets to run, so as to ensure that large players who can be held accountable for negligence enter the market. Similar measures are taken in the airline industry, with regards to fleet size and market capitalization, for similar concerns; that of consumer safety and preventing fraud. This ensures the formation of sustainable brands, which have the incentive to minimize accidents of their own fleet and to maintain safety standards, which are easily regulated for larger organizations.

The second suggestion is a simple and effective one. Singapore’s bus services had a similar problem of rash driving resulting in road accidents, and in response to this the bus corporations restructured the bonus of drivers so that it was directly linked to their safety record. A bus driver with low or minimal accidents or traffic violations was entitled to a full bonus, and the bonus is reduced with every violation. The drivers’ incentive is now changed from screaming down roads to pick up passengers to driving safely to avoid accidents; their pay is now linked to the same. A similar system would be easy to enforce and could prove to be very effective in reducing accidents caused on Delhi roads.