Airports should have user-friendly shuttle buses to ferry passengers

New Delhi: Even a school student will tell you that you cannot deploy high-floor buses with several steep steps to ferry passengers from the aircraft to the terminal and vice versa. Yet, you will find at several airports around the country, such buses plying on the airfield. At Delhi airport for example, I find senior citizens, people with heavy handbags and young women carrying babies, struggling to climb those steep steps to board the bus and to disembark.
I see people with knee problems wincing in pain as they board the bus.
How can anyone be so insensitive to the safety and comfort of passengers, particularly senior citizens and those who are physically challenged? As consumers, we need to know who was responsible for bringing such buses into the airports, because frankly, I do not see any place for such buses at the airports.
In fact, ferrying passengers in buses should be stopped forthwith and airlines should provide aerobridges for the safe transfer of passengers from the aircraft to the airport terminal. It is archaic to use staircases and bus shuttles.
If this cannot be done immediately, then the least that can be done is to provide buses that are more consumer-friendly. I have seen for example, low-floor buses that have a 'kneeling suspension' that allows the floor to be lowered almost to the road level so that passengers, particularly those on wheelchairs, can board the bus without any problem.
12/09/10 Pushpa Girimaji/Hindustan Times

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Categories: airports Sep 2010