chennai in an attempt to boost patronage chennai metro rail limited has come up with strategies including collaborating with chennai super kings csk to provide free ride for fans hosting music events at stations and on trains and offering free nontransferable tickets to students currently cmrls average patronage on weekdays is 25 lakh and less than 2 lakh on weekendscmrl is looking to partner with organisers of major events along all metrorail corridors to subsidize train ticket prices said an officialon monday fans headed to the ma chidambaram stadium for the csklsg ipl match were offered free rides while the game was livestreamed on led screens at five stations fans were also given feeder services from government estate station to the stadiumsoon watching matches at metro stations may cost 10 an hour while free nontransferable tickets may be issued to potential passengers like students from colleges near metro stations identified through surveys our focus is to attract first time passengers we have seen that passengers who get a chance to travel by metro once continue to use the trains he saidthe recent ar rahman concert attracted an additional 1600 passengers as cmrl offered free feeder service from central metro to the venue and regularly made announcements at stations nearly 1600 passengers travelled between 11pm and midnight as we extended service hours by an hour and we made 1 lakh normally barely 300 people travel between 10pm and 11pm sivasubramaniam jayaraman of the institute for transportation and development policy said cmrl must understand the mindset of students and attract them by offering certain discounts and privileges cmrl can do a minimum kyc and send congratulatory messages to students completing a certain number of trips give them credit points that can be used later