Banglore is the fastest growing city in Asia. As a result of this a considerable lot traffic is added every year. The roads are hitting a bottleneck with the ever increasing traffic. Current population of bangalore is around 70lakh. This topic discusses the current traffic conditions specific to bangalore and how these can be overcome. Lets see the goal of our country and compare ourselves where we are and where we will be if the traffic conditions are not taken care.
To start with, here are some numbers. Lets consider a developed India. WOW! Developed?? You mean a billion people have per capita income capable of buying a car for each! That’s a billion cars and add to it other vehicles. A billion cars would need a lot of area for movement, lots of roads. Lets consider the garage space for all the cars in India. That’s 12000 sq km(considering a 4 by 3 metre space needed per car). Road space needed for movement is 200000 sq kms!!. Now consider the size of Karnataka, 191,791 sq km. That’s the size of a big state needed just to move cars around. Interestingly, the current number of cars used currently in India is close to 15 million, that’s just 3000sq km of road space used. Every million increase of cars will need 200 sq km of agricultural area and reduces the grain production by 80000 tonnes!!
This is unimaginable since from 3000 to 200000 sq km is a huge way to go from now. Now lets just consider bangalore, 7 million people need 1500 sq km of road space and size of bangalore is 670sq km. Its obvious that we cannot have so many cars in such a small space. It is impossible to have a developed bangalore with each person having his/her dream car. So pathetic we are at managing our population.
So what can be done to improve the conditions? Shall we increase the size of bangalore? Or shall we ban all such vehicles? This is not new. Lets try to look at other developed nations as to what they have done for traffic jams. Singapore is a highly developed city with a population of 4.5 million. The size of singapore is very small, 634 sq km. As we can see every person cannot have a car in Singapore and the city cannot expand as there is no space left! So what have they done? People need quality traffic so that they work effeciently and still spend less time in traffic. Singapore government understood this was seerious. They followed a series of steps based on certain factors. Some factors they considered are:
1. Most people do not need car since they stay within city
2. Cars are needed only to travel between office and home.
3. Most people are comfortable if mass trasit system can make them reach their destination with very less time and stress.
4. Make travel by mass trasit systems faster than going by their own vehicle.
5. Time to reach a mass rapid system and distance must be less.
6. Ease of use with huge number of people coming from different countries.
The solution they got is,
1. Increase tax for new cars to 175%. This means that we'll have to shell out 3 times more money in singapore to buy a car than in India.
2. Underground trains with a train to each destination every six minute.
3. Busses to every destination with proper timing for every buy controled by GPS.
4. Information about mass transport in every place, about busses, trains are easily accessible. LCD based display on every bus on future destinations.
5. If city cannot expand its width, expand it vertically. There are seldom single houses in the city. Most flats are 35 floors or more in height. This gives more road space.
6. Using mass transit/ busses, one can reach their destination in half an hour at most times through out the day. This applies even during peak traffic hours.
The above was about a single city which cannot expand itself in width. Now consider Japan. Expanding a city results in increasing cost of living as everything becomes costly. Thus given an option to stay in near by towns and cities, one can travel their destination within a small period of time using bullet trains.
Bullet trains travelling at 270km/hr, at this speed, one can go to bombay from banglaore in just 4 hrs. People in near by cities can use a combination of bullet train and mass transit/ busses to reach their destination in an hour. Travelling from mysore to bangalore will be reduced to half an hour. And the frequency of trains can be increased which will cover the cost of development.
Thus bangalore has to grow higher, increase vehicle taxes, provide good intracity and intercity travel reducing time to travel. I dream of travel from one big city to another big city in India within ten hours on land. And travel from anywhere to anywhere within a state and near by destinations within 4 hours. Further less than an hour travel within near by cities to a big city and half an hour travel from anywhere to anywhere within a city.
3 comments:
Hi,
Your suggestions indicate a massive change in infra... even the ongoing metro project in bangalore seems to have taken longer time than expected...
One more technology which can be thought about is making the traffic signalling, a bit more adaptive to actual traffic...
In some countries, I believe some experimentation has been done with use of RFID tags on automobiles & RFID readers on roads, with some central server, having information of traffic based on which it 'intelligently' controls the traffic signals in real time.
dlmalani@yahoo.com
I agree with you on the traffic system. Like our internet networking,where each packet has a tag, the flow of traffic can identify the best signalling system and wait system. We have our experience in network traffic, its high time, pass it on to the vehicle network.
The suggestion is massive, however, India plans to acheive a growth rate of 9% in nesxt few years. Cities become the major growth factor, with bangalore like cities growing at 15% per year. Traffic volumes will keep increasing at this growth rate.
Like other countries, we are trying to build new cities, like the one coming in place of Bidadi. However, the project is yet to take off. This new city will provide all facilities and is expected by 2012. This project will ease some traffic in bangalore.
One good comment you made is of using RFID for traffic signaling. While this helps, its no where near the enormous growth in traffic. Few countries have surcharge system for many roads which use auto pay method. This ensures only important traffic moves. All these might come in handy.
I do not agree that massive investments/change in infra will be tough task as the bidadi project cost is unimaginable 60K crore. Road infrastructure takes more space and much more costlier than high speed trains. revenue can be generated from these trains in the increase in train traffic as the travelling speeds are 5 times more than present train speed.
A day will come in bangalore where we start pondering over a small space.
Come September 2008, Tata's Nano will hit roads. More than a lakh car is expected to hit bangalore in few months time. At this point, Govt MAY start realising the importance of a change.
Chidananda
i agree with you we need that big change in Infra.
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