Daily Times

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) government on Wednesday suspended the Peshawar Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) service temporarily, as it conducts a technical review of the project’s buses for safety purposes.

“A fresh review of BRT’s buses will be held,” said TransPeshawar Spokesperson Muhammad Omair. “The safety of the passengers is the institute’s topmost priority,” he said. He said a detailed review of the buses will be conducted by the company that manufactured them, adding that an investigation was also being carried out to determine why two buses of the project had caught fire earlier. “A comprehensive investigation and inspection of all buses will be conducted,” he said.

“The BRT service will be restored after it is completely cleared [from defects] from all technical angles,” added the spokesperson. He said that the decision had been taken in the larger interest of Peshawar’s citizens. Last week, a fire erupted in a BRT bus near Gulbahar Station, local media had reported. According to eyewitnesses, the bus caught fire just as soon as it arrived at the station.

There were passengers inside the bus when it caught fire, however, they managed to escape just in time. Rescue 1122 was called to the site and the fire was doused. This was the third BRT bus to catch fire recently. A fire had erupted on the roof of a metro bus on August 26, followed by another bus that met the same fate in the city’s Phase-VI Hayatabad area. The Peshawar BRT, one of the flagship projects of the government, was launched on August 13. The project was completed at a cost of Rs69 billion in 36 months.