the problem lies within us

The greens group 'Hasiru Usiru' had organised a public meeting last week to convey its protest against the BBMP's road widening programme and the resulting destruction of the city's tree wealth. I made a presentation captioned "Better bussing for a green Bangalore" towards offering alternate solutions. My experience, detailed in the following posting I made in the HU y-group, will show where the problem largely lies.

That improved bus services is the most cost-effective answer to the exponentially increasing traffic, and attendant problems, in the city has been known for ages. But, neither the government nor the people want to look beyond BMTC to provide it - some because of vested interests, some because of dogma, some due to a lack of awareness, and some because of a combination of all these factors.

Yes, there are the lot, who in their fascination with the ‘growth’ of the economy, seem oblivious of the stress we are subjecting mother earth to. In that respect, Mr D’s presentation has considerable relevance, and, with his permission, I am proposing to pass it on to various groups, more particularly ones involving school children.

When I originally proposed to make my presentation at the public meeting, there was every effort to dissuade me. At the meeting, every effort was made to hurry me through, so much so, I was quite distracted and missed out on many aspects that I wanted to bring out before the gathering. The press release, as well as the display material at the venue, didn’t seem to carry any of the points that I was making. The specific mention of ‘facilitating entry of private players into bus services’ in the Urban Transport Policy was deliberately omitted. I was asked specifically to state that the views expressed were my own.

Now, the question that arises is where do the people responsible for all these fit into in the list that I have made out at the end of the first para? I must admit I am a little perplexed. In their desperation to see that the TVS’s and TATA’s don’t get into the picture, aren’t they subverting the interests of the HU? Isn’t TVS already amongst the biggest beneficiaries under the existing scenario, recording as it is perhaps the highest sales in the world for its two-wheelers in the city of Bangalore? And, aren’t TATA’s set to follow suit with their Rs1-lakh car?

Nobody can deny that the private sector players have shown us the way in the other sectors which have been liberalized, with everyone concerned including the poorest of the poor benefiting considerably. Admittedly, there are corrections required. But, that doesn’t mean we should continue to suffer and pay for the burdens imposed by the public sector monopolies.

Muralidhar Rao

The irrationality of dedicated lanes

text of the letter sent to the New Indian Express:

I refer to the report captioned 'auto lanes may be allotted to BMTC' published in your columns on the 5th instant.

The idea of 'dedicated lanes' for BMTC buses seems to have caught the fancy of every self-appointed traffic expert. And, there seem to be plenty of them in the city today, apart from the author.

Now, going by plain logic, supposing in any given route direction, BMTC is operating at a frequency of a bus every 3 minutes, and the buses are moving at an average speed of 10 kmph, there will be a gap of 500 M between any two buses. As such, if a lane is dedicated exclusively for the buses, it will then push out 100 other vehicles from this 500 M stretch (making for 200 vehicles per km), assuming an average vehicle length of 5M, and near bumper-to-bumper traffic conditions. This is total under utilisation of high demand city road space.

There is a telling picture of a stretch of road in some city, showing an empty stretch of over 100M behind a bus on a dedicated lane, even as the adjoining lane (in the same direction) is totally cluttered with vehicles of all kinds, particularly two-wheelers. Very clearly, even with having introduced high capacity mass transport bus services on dedicated lanes, the citizens still prefer to use their two-wheelers, leading to the problems remaining unresolved.

The above is just one factor. The chaos the dedicated lanes cause at road junctions is another major factor. Further, with the dedicated lanes generally located on either side of the central median, providing access to commuters becomes complicated and expensive. Dedicated lanes on the edges are a new concept, but suffer from similar infirmities.

Thus, while dedicated lanes may be OK on stretches leading to and from bus depots, or on stretches where the frequency is higher than say a bus every 15 seconds, on regular roads, they are totally ill-advised.

Rather than dedicated lanes, total ban on private vehicles (meaning - vehicles other than buses, taxi's and auto's) on select stretches, during peak hours, would any day be preferable.

The idea of the auto lanes on arterial roads was, in the first place, to segregate slow moving traffic. The purpose will be better achieved by banning slow moving traffic altogether on these roads, and confining them to the non-arterial roads. Eventually, however, it would be best if auto's are gradually phased out of the city roads over a couple of years, and replaced by four-wheeler taxi's, by incentivising the process.