800 out of 4000 BMTC buses have bilingual destination boards

i guess i agree. we have said this before too. bus signs, vehicle number plates are not the place to sestablish primacy of kannada in karnataka. bus signs should be bi-lingual and vehicle plates should be in english letters.

sri. i too have observed that signboards are very small and can barely fit the necessary information even in one language forget two. so that problem no. 1. small size of display .

just an example: http://www.flickr.com/pho...

another thing, this might look trivial but fonts. when you have to look at things from far, you can only grasp very large scale features and care must be taken that the large scale features dont get masked by unnecessary details.  most hand painted signs have lots of squiggly and squirrlies, which sometimes mask details. i have seen this in practice. cant give you a concrete example right now.

but basically lines must be straight, curves smooth and standard and so on. like helevetica font. you can blow it up or shrink it without loosing information. which is not possible with other stylized fonts.  hand painted signs are a job for somebody i suppose.  but perhaps he can diverse into printing standadized boards using templates? just like they do in publishing?

for a group that boasts multi crore profits, i suppose investing in getting the most basic information right should not be a problem.

narayana would know more.

You can also read the discussion that is on here http://bangalore.citizenm...

Please do leave your comments on the same.

- Vaishnavi Vittal

www.citizenmatters.in

It is the 'take it or leave it' attitude of the powers that be which is causing the havoc.

What objection can be there to rewrite the existing boards with larger numbers and the destination on either side in Kannada & English?

Surely it will cost only a pittance compared to the huge losses being incurred on high-end buses.

We should have an early meeting with BMTC to press our views. Will Rithesh/Manjari please try?

K.V.Pathy

Sarvagna sir - I appreciate your tone - "People who are here for long time who don't care to take trobubles in understanding local language will anyhow crib".

See - I am with you on this problem statement. There needs to be some soft-enforced way of making long term residents of the city learn the local language. I think we have all talked this on the other threads (which usually get closed after we lose our way).

But sir, please don't overthink this particular matter, avoiding bilingual sign boards is not the way to deal with the original problem statement (above) - doesn't deserve so much attention. The reality is that local language + english combo is what most are used to in our diverse country.

And BTW - I didn't grow up here. Can speak kannada fair enough, understand really a lot, but not read well yet. A lot what I can read, I picked up from the bilingual signs. The first kannada alphabets I learned were na ga ra, guess where, from the bilingual signs at various places (BTS buses as well) for Jaya na ga ra and J P na ga ra etc.

 Naveen - while I agree with you that many states have local language only boards, that is no justification for saying that bilingual boards should not be there in Bangalore.  What is the logic in that?  I have had to learn the Bangalore bus system the hard way... asking people at bus stop, staff in the bus etc. and sometimes getting into the wrong bus and ending up in "new" places.  

We are only talking of bilingual boards - Kannada AND English.  Not converting the whole thing to English. Why should anybody complain about that.? Folks need to keep in mind... learning to read  and write is a challenge as compared to speaking.  For me, that is what takes the maximum amount of time Speak<Read<Write.  Whatever Kannada alphabets I recognize has been learnt  by looking at bilingual boards - like SB so astutely pointed out.

If you ask me, if BMTC were to convert all boards to bilingual boards with nice large clean font and well lit, overnight... I bet you nobody would complain.  It is only when we get into all kinds of detailed discussion about this that we get a mountain out of a mole hill.

one way to make space is to only have destination name on the board. bcoz it does not matter where the bus came from what matters is where it is going.

for example:

numbers in english letters. (everybody who can read knows how to identify currency). kannada in bigger font because it takes more space. english in smaller size, yet visible and legible.

reflective material for background (silver)

clean cut / stencilized signs in black.

blue/white, green/white etc etc also ok.

 Agreed that the issue is applicable all over the country.  Being residents of Bangalore, we can only demand bilingual boards here, right? Tomorrow, if I move to another city with the same issue, will certainly make the same demand there.

Sunil Saar - onde question. You said -

"I am born & educated from Bangalore but my Kannada touch has gone"

seri. I am also for bilingual sign boards, our ooru is a different place now. Sanjayv SB etc moved here, so have speaking/listening ability but no reading writing so far. okay pa.

But why and how people who are born and educated here can not have the 'kannada touch'.

Please don't take it personally Sunil sir, but will everyone agree that at least this should never happen.

one issue with destination only signboards is that every time the bus changes directions, the board must be changed.

either the conductor or the driver have to physically and personally change the board.

this repetitive job must some how be made easy. so some reason i have not seen boards being changed instantaneously. it takes a few minutes to get the right board and the right alignment. this can be nagging.

i think simplest solution would be to have a board printed on both sides(335 HAL on one side, 335H kadugodi on other), and mounted at the deck level on the windshield.

but the best location for the boards is still on the top. only changing signs and cleaning is a problem. any mechanical engineers who can think of some simple, robust, mechanisms that can help change the signs?

also,as far as possible, the boards should be flush with  the glass. especially when mounted on the top. the glass tends to be dusty, and farther behind the board is from the glass more difficult it is to read the board.

anybody know why the boards are in the condition they are?

yes sir.  do you think there is enough clearance for that? need slightly more than height of the board. or do you think it is possible use some simple extension mechanism? that can pull it out of the chamber?

ids raayre,

morning only seeing well and in night going and falling in it? knowing all that you know, what are the chances they are going to do it? pojjibility and feajibility two different things, i dont have to tell you.

any case, in terms of form, i am not really happy with LED boards. they dont have the resolution - yet. ofcourse they are oozing with functionality, but even there, it seems like a bit of a overkill of a solution for the problem. lets us just say it is not an elegant solution. it will work. but it does not hit the spot.

what happens is, they to scroll and roll text. idyalla anta they try to mimic dasara stalls in mysore. bit of an exaggeration. what happens is when it starts rolling like that, many times i have to wait for the relevant information to pop up.

aside a few months i saw something in HD. i was disoriented. agreed i watch very little tv, but HD has more resolution than real life. which is very very disorienting. i actually got severe headache.

But Naveen's post got my goat a bit.  I tried hard to stick to the straight and narrow, but this is a bit like a red flag to a bull

I will request a delete on my post.

Srivathsa

Guys,

Its been quite a lengthy discussion goin on here about boards & buses. And my! Is this the most popular subject for Praja to discuss or what?! Anyway, nice to see vivid inputs being offered on this thread.

But then, I feel there are some (more) serious things that have been grossly missed out in this discussion until now. And that pertains to a couple of structural and cultural issues.

Structural -

Someone already hinted at this while saying the LED boards are not the true solution because the text keeps scrolling, and perhaps by the time you happen to read the destination name (in your preferred language!), the bus would have passed-by, or chances are, you board it and thats not the bus you needed! So do we get the point? The problem arose because (1) The board had two languages (Yes, all LED boards are bilingual) and (2) way too much text to display all at once.

(Cultural -)

While we're trying to solve this "perceived" problem, these I feel are the two things we need to look at. (Of course, here in I am assuming painted boards are a no-go in future. We need boards that are not at the behest of a painter, true; I agree on that.) The fact that there's way too much text content to be displayed on boards and that leads to scrolling cannot be done away with. Those are names, and names should NOT be modified - unlike in some unfortunate cases where it has already happened. Doddakkanahalli (near Sarjapura road) has been misspelt in several places (in english) as Doddakanneli - while the former has a meaning as well as a historical relevance, the latter is akin to the absurd Seringapatinam Britishers derived from Srirangapattana. So text & its length are really not in our control, neither do we want to coin new short-forms for places unless we can well manage a unique list of acronyms. Such a cultural adverse trace can be averted by employing Kannada script to spell our names.

Now this leads us to think: since this already long text was required to be displayed in two languages, it was designed to be a scrollee. Now this is something that could be looked at.

I agree there are people of all kinds coming into Bangalore, perhaps on a regular basis, if not daily. I seriously think a system as long standing as BMTC doesn't need to equip itself to such a variable entity as a "momentary visitor" to the city. (But amidst such good discussions, any TDH's way of converting this into a discussion about chauvinism or his/her perceived struggle against such chauvinism better not be entertained here.)

Thinking deeper into the problem - if reading Kannada is the main issue then learning to read it is one obvious solution. But if number plates and bus boards are not language flaunting places, neither can these be places from which one can learn Kannada (via  English), right? So either of these arguments has to be dropped if we need a solution here. And to arrive at a solution, we'll HAVE to drop a few outliers in people - a kannadiga who cant read (kannada) is certainly an exception in BLR's population. He should re-pick-up kannada for his own benefit.

So the solution I have is a mixture of structural and cultural. One - BMTC needs to hire some really smart graphics & software engineers (or perhaps fund a student project) and get good Kannada fonts designed for LED display, and perhaps make good bus-stops giving bus-number to route correlations.. and Two - people who have made BLR their settlement (newly or old) - mostly those that matter to BMTC's business (BMTC is not for charity, right?) - must put in sincere efforts to learn to speak/read Kannada. There are plenty of avenues available today if one wanted to do that - paid & free. A good 2-3 hours spent learning/teaching Kannada with people every week is time well invested. Serves your intention to be talking on this forum well. Otherwise, I guess we'd just be re-triggering threads of this kind forever, and ever! Just looking back at how late BMTC board discussions on Praja date back to! And many people on this forum could have definitely learnt to read kannada as fluently as I do!

First off the scroll is a really bad idea. If you want to display the entire route paste the route maps in the bus stop and make it available online and via sms for the route. In which case just the destination along with number is sufficient for a person to indicate if he was standing on the right side of the road, since he can always look at the billboard in the stop for the route map. 

The scroll is no reason to kill LED boards, simple wiring of all 3 boards (front, back & side) to a control panel near the driver will ensure proper and consistent display.

We are the tech capital right. How about sponsored kiosks which can dish out route info in all languages of India. Mobile apps? web enabled phone go to BMTC mobile page on the site or sms route number and language and get the entire route in your fav language. Dont know route number? sms destination and get route numbers. Dont know destination? ummm...

@Subbabhatta,

Well, frankly, I think you've thought it out pretty well. And I must admit your thinking is on the right line when it comes to shrinking names to make them readable. But... but, I am skeptical about such shrinking when it comes to names printed in Kannada.

ಬ್ಯಾಟರಾಯನಪುರ takes the same number of pixels (in width) as ಬ್ಯಾಟರಾಯನ ಪು and in fact the latter form could have aliasing effects with words beside it, leading to added confusion to the observer on road. The same applies to English print as well. Summarily I dont think we save much space at the "first level" you've described.

The "second level" though makes matters a li'l complicated, because whenever such shrinkings are done, the system calls for a standard method of shrinking names, which BTW, becomes a herculean task against its returns! We need to have a methodology to stick to when shrinking names, how many chars to chop, how many syllables to keep to maintain readability, etc. Finally this solution shouldnt make more people ask people on road, or the driver/conductor about the bus' destination and sorts!

Besides, I feel BMTC boards need to get into the commuters' brains. We need three things to be displayed. (1) Route No. (2) Next Stop (3) Final Destination - Most of the people on a bus dont travel all the way until the final stop, they mostly need info about interim stops - which makes the "Next Stop" info vital enough. With all these factors, I think making one language boards is very much a necessity. Look at this for instance in Japan:

@subbabhatta,

I for once am not very convinced that name shrinking will help - esp'ly on Bengaluru buses.

But if you have to do trials, coming up with a list of all the official (and unofficial, which need to be official) stops in Bengaluru could be your first task.

The other approach would be if someone here is good at text-graphics, we need a good, unaliasing glyph set (as far as possible straight lines dominated) to re-build the Kannada alphabet to make (1) long-distance reading easier, and (2) fitting long words in less width easier.

@ silkboard,

I agree info on bus stops could be bilingual, but the same rules apply - the names should not be obscured or altered just because it is difficult to pronounce in the particular person's own language. What has happened to Dose (now widely altered as Dosa) stands a trivial and startling example of how native words could get modified when anglicised, or put to a form to appeal to a wider audience. This needs caution to be exercised - only then bi-lingual signboards  will really serve the purpose, and do no harm at the same time.

For next-stop info, the bus conductor could himself do that. He's already doing that inside the bus. If he does it in a specified way, it could reflect outside as well. But then, if we HAVE to adopt hi-tech, BMTC buses are already GPS tracked, so that is not a tuf target to get at I suppose.

Like I said, unless BMTC goes the true global way, and outsources some such non-core tasks to small companies, or even spawns off student projects, yes, this will be tough.

I hate generalisng... and agree that its a bad thing.But pls think really hard n tel me, isnt it true that most ppl who are netsavvy...or let me put it bluntly...ppl who are well to do, i mean..who dont have many probs, dont bother voting!

eg;Mumbai 40%voting v/s rural areas 70%

Im not sure if u agree...but i know it for sure that this is the reason most politicians dont bother about any of the so called well to do population.Again this is a generallisation..but think, where does generalisation spring from..

What i was rying to say in that blog was..either make all cities in india trilingual(which seems very tough) or dont waste time debating..

and by the way..u have cut my freedom of expression by not posting my earlier entry!!

I did not remove your post.  By the time I responded to it a moderator had removed it (as it was not in line with the guidelines here).  My post looks rather silly now :)

I agree with you that till we start voting in large numbers we don't count.  And if you search the site you will find some efforts there as well.

Why should it be an all or nothing approach - we live here and not in Delhi or Calcutta.  BMTC itself has bilingual electronic boards on its Vajra service.  Also then even the numbers should be in Kannada - why leave that in English? 

Last but not least - I think the local population deserves better than what is being dished out to them as a bus service.  There are no proper bus stops, the blue buses are pretty badly maintained, etc etc.  Don't those things matter as much as the language in which the signboards are written.  Look at a BEST bus (and not the aircon ones) and see the difference for yourself.

Srivathsa

Dear globetrotter,

Let us do some simple vedic mathematics here. Since globe trotters are likely to have the most accurate local numbers, let us take your statement only - , say its true:

HOW MANY PPL IN BLORE CAN READ ENGLISH:10%??

Let us add an assumption that these people can't read Kannada. Okay that would mean 4 lakh commuters (assuming 40 lakh commuters in the city)

How many of these will have cars? Lets say all.

How many of these take the bus? Say less than 10%. 40000.

What things do you need to do to have this number go up from 10% to 50%. From 40000 to 2 lakhs?

Why is this important in the first place. 2 lakhs minus 40000 = 1.6 lakh cars. Thats 1.6 lakh x 50 = 800 lakh sqft of free space on the road. For us to walk, and for us to go faster in all those buses.

But yes, as Srivathsa says, don't think sign boards will be the main thing, but will be one of the things needed to get there. [We on Praja know this. Thats why you have more discussions (and meetings with people as well) on routing reforms, local shuttles, bus shelters etc than signboards.]

Or you can mix it up with the other (relevant, yes - but a separate) issue by proposing a solution where these 2-4 lakh people should be forced to learn kannada to read signboards. This too can be done (read other threads), but not via this signboard talk.

"Any why does everyone quote that one word(Globetrotter) that i mentioned in that entire paragraph..."

Probably because other people on this forum have seen more places than you  have but do not want to wear their 'globetrotter' identity on their arms..? Just guessing ;)

Just cross the border to Hosur. You can find trilingual/tetralingual? markings in  the sides town buses. Awesome thought by the tnstc salem wing to include Tamil, Kannada, telugu in bus signs.