This story is from September 14, 2017

STUCK IN A JAM? BRACE FOR WORSE

By 2022, Bengaluru may have over a crore vehicles on its streets
STUCK IN A JAM? BRACE FOR WORSE
By 2022, Bengaluru may have over a crore vehicles on its streets
Hassle-free, smooth-flowing traffic is a dream for every Bengaluru motorist. Wishful thinking, one might say, given that the city’s traffic woes have pretty much got everyone’s goat. And if the experts are to be believed, it is only going to get worse. Conservative estimates put the vehicle population on Bengaluru’s roads at over 70 lakh, (which does not consider the non-Karnataka registered ones) — a nearly 100% rise in a decade — which is expected to cross a crore in the next five years.
Solutions such as increased use of public transport and carpooling are among the primary suggestions that crop up, but a quick look at our roads will point to the fact that no one follows this. Most cars on our roads, if not a cab, have single occupants.
So, we asked two men who deal with traffic issues on a daily basis for their thoughts on decongesting Bengaluru.
One of the major reasons for the dense volumes of vehicles on our roads is the psychology of the working class. They don’t drive a car as a necessity, but see it as an asset or luxury. Hence, carpooling is not going to work, as they think that sharing a vehicle is only for the poor.
Second, there is a need to ban old vehicles. Registration of new vehicles is not really the issue, as they are more energy-efficient and relatively more safe. We recommend that vehicles over 15 years should be banned from the streets owing to the pollution caused and their lower road-worthiness. At the moment, re-registration of old vehicles based on a fitness test is allowed for commercial vehicles. That should be stopped. Once these old vehicles are off the road, it will reduce the burden to a certain extent.
Third, we require more Metro lines to connect the entire city. At present we are at less than 100 km connectivity and will need at least 500 km coverage to effectively decongest the roads. It is our legacy that we plan things late, and hence, orders for extra bogies for the existing lines have gone only now, as officials earlier thought it would be manageable with the three carriages that each train had. Metro has to be taken up on a war footing, else by the time plans are executed, Bengaluru traffic will grind to a standstill.

R Hithendra
Additional Commissioner of Police, Traffic
Urging people to car pool or use public transport will have very minimal impact on the vehicle density on our roads. Major impact will be in controlled
parking on our streets. 60% of Bengaluru roads are narrow, which are not being widened or cannot be. If parking is allowed on either side of such stretches, it reduces the capacity by 1/3 to 2/3. In such a scenario, if the powers that be are serious about decongesting the city, they should think about removing all on-street parking, creating parking lots elsewhere as multi-level car parking (MLCP) structures or off-street parking on open fields. In the long run, they will also have to explore the option of having multi-level basement parking structures below the various parks in the city.
Instead of calculating the volumes on our roads and how much widening of roads should happen to accommodate the traffic, the government is widening footpaths, irrespective of the number of pedestrians who take that route. Right now, what we are doing — decreasing the width of existing roads and allowing parking on these stretches — is wrong. Bengaluru has about 14,000 km stretch of road, of which 60% is narrow. Close to 30% roads do not have footpaths at all, due to which pedestrians walk on the stretches meant for vehicles.
New infrastructure, in the form of flyovers and grade separators, will only push more traffic in that direction. Instead, authorities should improve public transport, especially Metro and mono-rail, to allow people to get in and out anywhere they want.
MN Sreehari,
Traffic expert
End of Article
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