Hadapsar-Wagholi Has No Metro and No BRT. In July, PMPML Promised a Trial Bus. Nothing Since.

Here's a route with a real transit gap: Hadapsar to Wagholi. No Metro line reaches it. No BRT corridor serves it. If you don't have your own vehicle, your options on that stretch are an auto, a crowded regular bus, or nothing.

On July 21, 2026, PMPML said it had a fix in testing. The transport utility began trial runs of electric double-decker buses on ten routes across the city - explicitly chosen, according to the coverage at the time, because they're corridors without Metro or BRT connectivity. Hadapsar-Wagholi and Hadapsar-Swargate were named among them. Switch Mobility, the same company that supplies Mumbai's BEST fleet with double-deckers, provided a bus for the trial, and company staff were on hand alongside PMPML's own team to track how it performed.

That was the plan: test it, measure passenger response and operational performance, then decide whether to roll it out wider. It's been more than three months. No result has been reported.

This isn't the first attempt, either

PMPML already ran a double-decker trial once before, in the Hinjawadi area back in September 2025. That one surfaced what reports describe only as "operational challenges" - enough that the utility didn't move to a wider rollout, and instead went back and tried different routes this July. So the honest status of PMPML's double-decker programme, going into this second trial, was already "promising but unresolved."

What makes this trial worth watching closely is a separate, conflicting report that surfaced around the same period: PMPML had paused its plans to procure double-decker electric buses altogether, citing recurring breakdowns in its existing e-bus fleet - 160 buses inducted back in 2019 - traced to battery degradation and the toll Pune's traffic takes on charge life. Heavy congestion, officials said, drains the batteries faster than the buses are rated for. PMPML's CMD reportedly ordered a plan to cut those breakdowns within a month. Separately, the city's much larger commitment - 1,000 new electric buses under the central PM e-Drive scheme - is said to remain on track regardless of what happens with the double-deckers specifically.

Put those two threads together and the picture isn't encouraging: a utility running a public trial on routes that genuinely need it, while simultaneously dealing with battery problems serious enough to pause its own broader double-decker buying plans. Nobody has said the July trial failed. Nobody has said it succeeded either. It has simply gone quiet.

What "no update" actually costs

For a commuter on Hadapsar-Wagholi, a stalled trial isn't a procurement story - it's just another month of the same choice they had before July: crowd onto a regular bus, pay for an auto, or find your own way. The double-decker trial was specifically supposed to answer the question of what fills that gap. Right now it hasn't answered anything, and there's no public timeline for when it will.

That's exactly the kind of corridor where a shared ride does the most good, not because it's glamorous, but because it's the only option on the table that doesn't require waiting for PMPML's battery problems to get sorted out first. A full car between Hadapsar and Wagholi solves today's commute. A transit fix for that route is still, as of this writing, a trial with no announced result.