After agreement with South Korean company, 1000 buses headed for Karachi

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Sindh government on Saturday announced the expansion of the intra-city bus service in the southern port city of Karachi and signed an agreement with major South Korean bus service provider, Daewoo, for a thousand new buses to run in the metropolis in the coming months.
“Two hundred buses will run on the roads of Karachi within a month,” Ghulam Abbas Detho, Sindh Transport Secretary, told Arab News on Sunday.
The transport department official added this would be the first phase of the agreement, and the government planned on adding 200 buses to the fleet every month with a thousand buses expected to be on the roads within five months serving 100,000 people every day.
The teeming port city of Karachi with its population of 15 million people, is currently served by a fleet of ten buses under the intra-city bus service. It is Pakistan’s main seaport, as well as its financial and economic hub.
But due to congestion, difficult and often dangerous commuting routes, as well as air and noise pollution, the city was ranked by the Economic Intelligence Unit’s 2017 Global Liveability Report as one of the world’s most unliveable cities.
The Sindh transport authority has said the addition of new buses will spell the end of the city’s massive public transit problems and will be accompanied by the restoration of old bus depots.