Over the years significant investments have been made in installation and integration of the Intelligent Transport System (ITS) with the urban bus systems of the State Transport Undertakings (STUs). This Advanced Public Transit Systems (APTS), as it is commonly known, is an opportunity to improve the internal efficiency of the bus transport operations and commuter services. This provides benefits in terms of increased operational efficiency, improved journey time, reliability, safety, reduction in accidents, assistance in traffic enforcement, provision of real-time information to the public, enhancement of traffic signal efficiency, among others. 

This report has assessed how this expensive system is delivering on its intended objective and if these systems are being utilised to their optimum potential. This brings out several lessons from the ground experience to inform, reform and improve the system for effective impact to enable a roadmap for creating a national ITS platform for buses.      

This has outlined the need for reforming procurement practices around ITS to pay more attention to processes and expected outputs and outcomes from the ITS system and to develop performance metrics. Network digitization can leverage the intelligence more effectively for monitoring performance and optimizing schedules or passenger information systems. Visualization of data can improve transit schedules planning and adherence, prevent skipping of stops and passengers etc. MIS reports become actionable through data visualization and standardization of key performance indicators.