In India, one-third of the population lives in urban areas. Urbanization has increased from 31.28% to 35.39% since 2010, indicating demand for public transport in urban areas. New mass transit systems and unconventional situations (like COVID-19) pose challenges to existing bus services. Bhopal, a metropolitan and state capital has operated successful BRTS for a decade. The study aims to foresee the role of BRTS Bhopal in coming years as Phase I of the metro will be functional by 2026 expecting a shift in ridership from bus to metro causing a serious threat to the relevance of the bus. Factors affecting ridership can be categorized as travel attributes, user’s attributes, service quality and operational attributes as discussed in numerous studies. Statistical methods are used to analyze all four factors. Significant factors helped in comparing study area with other cities having metro. The 3 scenarios are built assuming the shift on overlapping routes. Recommendations on bus route rationalization, route lengths and fleet augmentation are given, priority areas for the routes are identified using PTAL (existing and predicted 2026). This study suggests when and how much fleet and route length of the bus network should be augmented with the example of Bhopal.