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Introduction
Rationalization is a process of making something seem consistent with or based on certain reasons, criteria and scientific study. It also means systematic organisation. Rationalisaton of bus stops means re-organizing the existing bus stops in a given route based on certain criteria like passenger density (no of passengers who will board and alight the buses in a particular bus stop), land use pattern in and around the bus stop, the inter-bus stop distance etc. Since the bus stops would have been installed before many years, the then density of the passengers and land use pattern would have undergone a drastic change and the bus stops would not commensurate with these changes. Hence there is an increasing need for the bus stops to be rationalized.

The route taken for the study is the "Saidapet - Thiruvanmiyur Stretch" in Chennai city, the fourth largest city in India. Geographical Information System (GIS) has been used in this study for rationalizing the existing bus stops for the study route. Since GIS has got the added advantage of better visual representation and easy analysis, GIS and in particular Arc View software has been used for the study.

Need for the Study
Chennai is the fourth largest Metropolitan City in India. Development has taken place at a faster pace. A lot of conversion and intensification of land use has also taken place. Totally nine fly-overs were completed in the last two years. The existing bus stops were constructed long back about five to ten years ago taking into consideration the various criteria like land use, accessibility to passengers and passenger density, which would have prevailed then. The bus stops are not rationalized periodically. Some bus stops are under utilized and some others are over utilized. Since there is a need to provide an equal and optimal accessibility to the users, the bus stops should be reviewed and relocated if found necessary and hence a study on the same is necessitated.

As a case study, Saidapet to Thiruvanmiyur route is taken. There is a lot of change in land use in and around the study route and the intensification of the land use has also gone up. For instance in Adayar a portion of land near to the canal has been converted from institutional to commercial place and two miniflyovers have been built along the study route, one in Adayar intersection and another in Ganthimandabam. These factors vouches for chosing Saidapet - Thiruvanmiyur route as the study route.

Objective
The objectives of the paper are,

• To describe the concept of bus stop rationalization and criteria behind the same.
• To apply Geographical Information System for analyzing and to draw inferences and findings.

Based on the findings, if warranted, the bus stops in the study route will be proposed for relocation and a proposal for installing new bus stops can also be arrived at.

Geographical Information System (GIS)
Geographical Information System is a computer based information system used to digitally represent and analyse the geographic details present on the earth surface and the events (non-spatial attributes linked to the geography under study) that are taking place on it. The meaning to represent digitally is to convert analog (smooth line) into a digital form.

"Every object present on the earth can be geo-referenced", is the fundamental key of associating any database to GIS. Here, term 'database, is a collection of information about themes and their relationships to eachother, and 'geo-referencing' refers to the location of a layer or coverage in space defined by the coordinate referencing system.

Geographical Information Systems are used to perform a number of fundamental spacial analysis operations. Such operations can use any number of analytical processes. However all spacial analysis utilizes the topological overlay, buffer generation, feature extraction, feature merging, join and relate. Overlaying technique is the one used for the study.