While private carriers ferrying regular commuters, mostly those employed at Hamad International Airport, are always seen fully packed to capacity, public transport buses between City Center Doha (CCD) and Hamad International Airport (HIA) hardly has any passenger to travel most of the time, it was found.
Though Bus No.777 has been operating between 5am and 11.30 midnight at 20 minutes gap, it is doubtful if even 100 passengers avail of their services altogether for the whole day, from either side. Most of the time the service is seen without even a single passenger on board even though it provides an economical conveyance to passengers between CCD and HIA.
It has been more than a year since the service started its operations on the CCD-HIA route.
The main difficulty cited by bus users for using the service is they need to first travel to CCD for boarding the bus. They also feel that no proper publicity
has been given for the service.
“Though there are a few points along the route from where one could board the bus, not even one passenger is seen boarding the bus from any of those places,” said a bus passenger who used the bus once recently while returning from HIA. He recalled that he was the only passenger in the bus.
Instead of operating all 777 services from CCD, bus users feel they could be operated from different locations in the city, like from the precincts of popular shopping centres so that it would be easy for airport-bound passengers to get into it from any of such points.
Meanwhile, the authorised private carriers are providing excellent connectivity to HIA from different locations across the city at affordable rates to their users, inquiries found.
“In such a situation who will take the risk of travelling to CCD and routes along the Corniche before getting into 777 service,” asked a regular user of a private carrier from
Mathar Qadheem.
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