Gulshan-i-Iqbal Town reported the highest occurrence of car theft as 41 cars were taken at gun point and 100 were stolen. The second most likely place to have a car stolen was Clifton, where 20 automobiles were snatched at gun point and 64 were reported stolen. North Nazimabad came in third with 25 armed carjacking and 59 stolen vehicles.

With the political scenario obviously tense in the city, security is the first casualty and we all need to be one notch more careful.

Some consider this as a proof that marketing and promotion always work, some consider this as a witness that a lot still needs to be done in terms of quality of service that is currently available to the customers which keeps ready to move to a better service and yet some maintain that anything that gets cheaper is a success in this price sensitive market.

The noisy smelly and accident-inviting PPP – private polluting power -seems ready to become a permanent part of the Karachi life. Given the volume of the current power crisis (credits abro @ flickr) and the way the crisis is being handled for commercial gains by everyone – from banks to leasing companies to small shops, we are all set to walk in Karachi that resonate with the noise of small generators and where even the tranquility of the morning is trashed by the engine noises.

Most of the motorbike repair shops in the city have found a great business in terms of maintaining and fixing these small generators that typically cost Rs 5,000 a piece due to the similarity of size and form of the generator engines and the engines of the motorbikes they are experts in.

Most main roads and signals are sporting fresh cloth banners and wall-chalking stating availability of small PPP generators across the city. Importers and casual investors have booked large orders of these machines hoping for good sales and profits. Even institutional players, like leasing companies, are not staying behind in reaping some possible windfall sales and associated profits.

KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) – A massive power outage struckPakistan’s commercial hub of Karachi early Thursday,leaving the entire city of more than 15 million withoutelectricity, an official said.

Supplies from the state-run Water and Power DevelopmentAuthority were suddenly cut, prompting the city’s entiredistribution network to shut down, said Sultan Hassan, aspokesman for the Karachi Electric Supply Corp.

“The power supply has come to zero. That isunprecedented,” Hassan said. “We are trying to find outwhy the power supply from WAPDA was discontinued.”

A spate of power cuts and shortages also of natural gasand wheat flour angered voters in the run-up to Feb. 18elections, when supporters of President Pervez Musharrafwere routed.

In their initial days, the buses sported a uniformed pair of driver and the ticket collecting conductor. The catch phrase for the new service at that time was, as we all remember, ’seat-by-seat’. The vehicles used to be air-conditioned and the new, simple but attractive color scheme (in the back-drop of the multi-colored, ‘chamak patti’ ridden minibuses) was an immediate hit with the people who wanted to pay a few extra rupee for a sensible ride to their workplaces.

But things changed fast. The rising city population and the persistent absence of a much needed mass transit system of any kind, the business heads behind these buses, apparently, realized it early on that with the existing demand of a moving vehicle (let alone a ’service’), these ‘attraction overheads’ are actually not needed. First, the make-shift seats appeared in the middle passage. The air-conditioners went faulty and were never repaired. The color of the vehicle and the dents and damages attracted over time were conserved as a memorable collectible lot. The uniforms were gone and the air-gymnastic conductor of the minibus found their way into the supposed saner Metrobus.

Today, the sight of a Metrobus on the roads of Karachi remains a painful reminder of how subsequent transport revamping schemes for this mega-city has failed and how difficult it remains for the general public to reach their workplace for an affordable cost in a reasonable way.

CDGK has gone a great job in replacing regular white street lights with sodium (yellow) lights in many localities. It gives a good lightening effect. However, a very high number of non-system connected street lights remain on 24/7 (see a previous entry on KMB on this topic) and this causes great power loss in a time when power is most needed. Street light power consumption is estimated at 24 megawatts in Karachi.

Theft security (apart from the price) of the solar panels atop these experimental arrangements might become an obstacle in mass deployment. Also, how long thru the night can these batteries last?

The BRTS will resemble a network of railway stations because instead of bus stops, there will be station-like compounds. Like railway tracks, no other transport will be allowed to ply on the track of buses under the BRTS.

Daily Time has details on the ADB Karachi Mega City Sustainable Development Project (KMCSDP) under which this BRTS project will be deployed in various phases. According to the details, ‘high pressure’ CNG stations will fill buses gas requirements in ‘2 minutes’.

The quarter billion dollar project will have three tranches with the following corridors details:

Tranche 1:
Surjani Town – Mazar-e-Quaid (20 km)

Mazar-e-Quaid – Karachi University (14 km)

Orangi Town Extension (4km)

Tranche 2:

Nagan Chowragi – Landi (21.5 km)

Rashidabad Extension

UP More Extensio (2.7 km)

Tranche 3:

Gulistan-e-Juaher – University Road (4.7 km)

KDA – Metropole via SF (10.4 km)

Shahrah-e-Quaideen (2.3 km)

Koragi – Shahrah-e-Faisal (18 km)

Defense (4.8 km)