Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) and Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH are jointly implementing the technical cooperation project ‘Integrated Sustainable Urban Transport Systems for Smart Cities (Smart-SUT)’. The project is to improve the planning and implementation of sustainable urban transport in selected Indian cities. The implementation focuses on the pilot cities of Kochi, Coimbatore, and Bhubaneswar. Further Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala is selected as a scale up city. KSRTC’s Thiruvananthapuram city bus service initiated a comprehensive route rationalization program and city bus improvement through technical support from GIZ in 2020-21. The study output concluded a comprehensive revamp or route structure to a trunk and feeder network. Along with the new network, there are efforts and improvements towards developing passenger centric infrastructure, facilities and systems across bus stops, terminals and interchanges. Wayfinding is a strategy that helps to promote strong user experience and they are often neglected while improving public transport systems. KSRTC recognizes the importance of developing wayfinding and transit information maps so that users are provided with correct information at appropriate places. Towards this, GIZ is supporting KSRTC under SMART-SUT project for designing and implementing innovative and passenger-oriented transit and area maps for ensuring effective information dissemination.

As part of the Smart SUT project, The Urban Lab is helping KSRTC and GIZ to prepare integrated transit map and area maps at terminals and major bus stations for Thiruvananthapuram. This shall include bus routes and provide information about interchanges, terminals and landmarks. The database generated through this exercise can be updated in future to produce maps in a ‘hard’ format or as a dynamic resource that can be integrated with mobile apps.

Services
Integrating Information
Preparing maps

Clients
Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)

Period
September 2021 – March 2022