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       PESHAWAR: The Peshawar High Court has summoned the Peshawar cantonment board’s executive officer and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Urban Mobility Authority’s director for responding to a petition, which sought its orders for the start of a notified feeder route of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) for the cantonment area.

       A bench consisting of Justice Shakeel Ahmad and Justice Sahibzada Asadullah issued the order over a petition jointly filed by Jamil Akhtar and several other residents against the “failure” of authorities to launch the BRT feeder route between Peshawar Stadium Chowk in cantonment area to Pishtakhara Chowk on Ring Road.

       The next hearing’s schedule will be issued later.

       The petitioners requested the court to accept their plea and direct respondents to ensure the early start of the bus service on the route in question to provide a comfortable mode of transportation to them and thousands of other residents.

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       Govt notified route between Stadium and Pishtakhara Chowks in 2018

       The respondents in the petition are the provincial government through its chief secretary, secretaries of the communication and works and transport and mass transit departments, managing director of the KP Urban Mobility Authority, and the cantonment executive officer of the Peshawar Cantonment Board.

       The counsel for petitioners, Mohammad Salman Ali and Barrister Rahat Ali Khan Nahaqi, said the Peshawar BRT was a swift bus transit system, whose one part covered an east-west corridor serving 32 areas on a dedicated track for private buses and the other comprising a network of feeder routes for buses to enter and exit the system to travel on the streets.

       They said the Peshawar BRT was inaugurated on Aug 13, 2020, as the fourth such service in the country.

       The lawyers said in May 2018, the provincial government had notified the areas within KP as the Mass Transit Areas with an immediate effect for Peshawar’s district as off-corridor feeder.

       They argued that while the feeder route from the Stadium Chowk to the Pishtakhara Chowk was mentioned in the notification, the petitioners and other people living along that route awaited its launch.

       The counsel said the company had been delaying the launch of the feeder route, while the Peshawar Cantonment Board was not been permitting the plying of BRT buses on cantonment roads.

       During the hearing, Justice Shakeel Ahmad observed that the government should have also started BRT service on the Khyber Road, one of the main arteries of the provincial capital.

       The bench observed that the Khyber Road was a busy route as several educational institutions, government offices and courts were situated along with it.

       Published in Dawn, November 2nd, 2024