The Transport Co plans to replace ageing inter-city buses with a hundred new vehicles on a three-year lease contract, company president Wuthichart Kalyanamitra says.
The company was in the process of drafting the terms of reference for the lease of the new 15-metre longer buses, he said.
The bid for the bus supplier was expected to be carried out by next month and the delivery of the buses must be made before the end of this year, he said.
Mr Wuthichart said that next year the Transport Co plans to replace old buses with 269 more new buses.
These are part of the company’s efforts to improve services which will also include a plan to install security cameras on its 800 buses and another plan to install Global Positioning System (GPS) trackers on about 13,000 public buses and vans operated by Transport Co’s contractors.
The company planned to install three security cameras on each of its 800 buses — one at the front of the bus, another inside the bus, and the other near the driver’s seat, Mr Wuthichart said. The cameras will be linked to Transport Co’s control centre using the GPS technology, he said.
The front camera is aimed to capture the traffic ahead of the bus while the one inside the bus is intended to capture what is going on in the passenger area. Many passengers had complained their belongings were stolen from the overhead compartment during their bus trips, he said.
The camera to be installed near the driver’s seat, meanwhile, is for monitoring the driver's behaviour. All the 800 buses should be equipped with the security camera and GPS system by the end of this year, he said.
The Transport Co also requested about 300 million baht from the Road Safety Fund for its plan to install GPS trackers on 7,000 public buses and 6,000 vans operated by companies that are Transport Co’s concessionaires.
"Safety will improve when GPS trackers are installed on these vehicles because their speeds will then be monitored in real-time and an instant warning message from Transport Co’s control centre will be sent to the drivers if they exceed the speed limit," Mr Wuthichart said.