How Industry can help reduce traffic congestion
- Photoyogi's blog
- Login or register to post comments
Forward this Blog entry
Praja.in comment guidelines
Posting Guidelines apply for comments as well. No foul language, hate mongering or personal attacks. If criticizing third person or an authority, you must be fact based, as constructive as possible, and use gentle words. Avoid going off-topic no matter how nice your comment is. Moderators reserve the right to either edit or simply delete comments that don't meet these guidelines. If you are nice enough to realize you violated the guidelines, please save Moderators some time by editing and fixing yourself. Thanks!
Comments
Car Vs Money
User Interaction Designer
Bangalore
Industry and transport
allowances
My company, as others do, provides allowances for commuting. One good practice they have is they give free bus passes from ITPL..this is worth 1200+
However they give car users 500 only and 2 wheelers 200 only!
making public transport more affordable and safer way to reach office..
Pubtrans - To be Made Primary
Yogi,
Your post is thought provoking. The companies that promote such car use cannot be penalized in any manner other than by trying to demerit them on blogs such as ours. If you see this from the co's perspective, it is to their advantage if employees use car since it promotes their image. So, they encourage it & both employee & employer benefit in a win-win situation for both of them, as they see it.
The consequences of car primacy, while a boon for the mobility & image of the people & their employers, are unfortunately quite negative for traffic flow, safety & air pollution.
Efforts by more responsible employers, no matter how sincere, will never solve this traffic excess & congestion problems, nor discourage car & two-wheeler use to levels sufficient to result in manageable levels, & at best, would continue to be referred to as "Positive Initiatives", whilst chaos continues & worsens.
The only way to fight this is by substantially improving public transport & make it compete with cars for traffic, whilst on the other side, discourage car use by imposing restraints & bringing in inconveniences such as higher costs & longer travel times.
Widening roads, building more flyovers, etc. without focus on public transport is possibly the worst solution & would be playing into the hands of car users & inviting more to the party !
The new generation industries[IT/BPO/ITES] are different
The entire working of these industries are different from the old PSU behemoths like HAL/ITI/BEML. The number of employees of an individual company is negligible compared to them(exception are a couple of biggies), the timings are different for various reasons, you can not expect all the 300 to shut work and queue for the company bus at sharp 6.PM, there are practical difficulties. Unless there is a significant number such a transport service cannot be made economical/ergonomical(I mean rationalized routes here).
Instead as Naveen suggested a reliable/efficient public transport is in place, lot of them will switch to it if not 100%. Tans Bagmane is such a good initiatiev. Why cann't we try BIAS kind of high end bus services from major residential areas to destinations where these industries are located? Say Whitefield, ORR, Electronic City, IRR, C V Raman Nagar etc as destinations. I reiterate the originating points should be residential areas, not the already consgested Majestic-Market-Shivaji Nagar trio & with rationalized routes and timings that run late into night say around 6AM - 10 PM. I think this is a business opportunity to BMTC or likes.
Ramesh
corporate contribution can make a quantum help..
I agree to many a view presented here in terms of reducing congestion and the responsibility of corporates in this regard.
While it is agreeable that companies will need its employees to be "IN" clean and in shape, and not smelling of sweat after travelling in a fully crowded bus on a hot day.. but then if you look at it, why are the buses so very crowded? ts because there are not as many of them as we need. It is the case in Bengaluru, Mysooru, and a lot many other cities in Karnataka. Outside too, perhaps.
So the loop closes here. People hesitate from taking buses, because they sweat when it gets crowded. Because more people do this, buses dont get enough money. Because of this, there are not enough buses on the road.
So I would say, corporates should at least INVEST a portion of their profits, or even as charity, into the public transport - BMTC in our case, and ensure BMTC has enough money to launch a much bigger fleet. This way at least in another 4 - 5 years timeframe with at least 100 IT companies contributing to this effort, we can substantially increase BMTC's fleet and ensure no bus gets overcrowded.
Then, lets see, which son of soil will hesitate from taking the bus to office.
They key, here, of course lies in the corporate investment in BMTC - which can itself be quite an effort for BMTC :o
Some stats:
1 BMTC volvo (Vajra) bus costs INR 77 Lakhs (approx. $183k)
1 Volvo like bus built by BMTC costs INR 20 L (approx. $48k)
1 Pushpak BMTC built costs INR 17L (approx. $40k)
Each medium-to-big sized corporate invests $50k per annum => Rs. 21 Lakh.
100 companies follow suit => Rs. 21 Crores
Say another 100 smaller companies invest too. Finally lets say we have Rs. 25 Crores per annum. That is nearly 150 Pushpak style BMTC buses on road in addition to what BMTC adds. In 5 years this will lead to around 750 new buses on road all because of corporates' contributions.
Before there's a demand raised to all such corporates, they need to be educated of such benefits of their investments - in turn the govt. can give them a few more sops, and ensure they see more monetary benefits in contributing.
My two paise on this.. people may want to refine this..
-Nijavaada
Public Transport "cess"?
How about a special "cess" for the cause of public transport. But it could work in a slightly different way.
In return for the cess, we all get free bus passes. We may decide not to use the bus passes, our problem. Since all people paying the "cess" will not actually use the buses, this could generate some finds as well. The thing is that a "cess" like this may force all of us to expect more from BMTC, and hence make it more responsive and better.
Sounds drastic, but this is much more sellable than forcing people to not buy cars or drive cars on odd/even days etc.
BTW, nice post and comments/stats by nijavaada etc here.
instead of a Cess - a bonus?
User Interaction Designer
Bangalore
cess
SB,
I'm not sure if you're aware of the cess on petrol we bangaloreans are paying towards infrastructure, including for metro.
Four Day week
Aware of the petrol cess
But I was thinking of ways to incentive citizens to push for and demand reliable public transport. A free bus pass in everyone's hand may do it. May be one mandatory bus day a month will do it. But need something to awaken people and make them realize that this mindless craze for wide roads and flyovers is not going to get us anything.
pbanavara - on the same lines, I was thinking what if companies had scattered workdays. Monday/Tue weekend for some, Tue/Wed for some. That should mix the congestion evenly through the week.
Work from home 1 day a week
When I was working in Singapore, my company had instituted a work from home option for employees. If you availed of it, you got a broadband connection, furniture, etc from the company. In turn you HAD to work at least 1 day/week from home and at most 2 days.
In turn, the company saved on real estate costs. If a company has 1000 people working and 60% availed of this, then they could save almost 120 people worth of office space if everyone of those worked 1 day/week at home. It is a big deal where rents are high. Another way to look at is that it can add another 120 people without adding office space (actually 120/(1-0.12))
In many of our IT companies, this can surely be put in place. In the case of programmers, it is fairly easy to check the next day if the stuff has been done or not.
Agree with SB - infrastructure in Bangalore means wide roads and flyovers. Even someone as enlightened as Swati Ramanathan was arguing that we need wider roads (see TOI yesterday) so that growth happens!
Srivathsa
Drive safe. It is not just the car maker which can recall its product.
Work from Home - A Great Culture
Srivathsa,
I think your idea is something that really could work, practically, too. Hell, we may never need the Metro or Mono or BRT !
Suppose this idea gains ground, as it did in Singapore, it's a win-win for all. The govt should facilitate this with tax sops & other incentives just as they do for charity work. We might see a reduction in operational costs for services & with internet becoming more & more widespread, one may have to travel very little, while the world changes around them & people begin to see the PC /Monitor as their office !
This is certainly a great idea, but this has not made too much headway yet. If this were made the norm instead of the exception, it will assist greatly in bringing down this chaos.
virtual office
User Interaction Designer
Bangalore
I myself work from home
Narayan,
I myself have a home office. My monthly car usage is about 120 km (weekend visits to parents, etc) or so and so am spared the horrors of Bangalore traffic. My wife works from home too. My kids go to the school nearby (<500m) and they go walking to school and back.
My clients are outside Bangalore and so every 2 weeks I fly out to meet them. I then take a taxi to the airport (usually very early morning) and fly back in the night.
A lot of self discipline is needed especially when there is no one to review my work daily.
Srivathsa
Drive safe. It is not just the car maker which can recall its product.
Me too...
I work from home full time.. Very rightly said guys a lot of self discipline is needed. But it works out quite well as I am spared the traffic and the difficult commute.
http://clean-and-green.bl...
Telecommuting
Our company here does allow employees to work from home. We did lot experimentation and found that it works only for certain types of projects and at certain phases of the project only. Even then, there is an indirect loss of efficiency. It works best when you don't interact with anyone during your regular work and more importantly, when no one interacts with you for their regular work.
It's partly to do with how the company develops talents. If everyone are expected to know everything (more horizontal coverage and less vertical depth), telecommuting works straightaway. But if each person develops deep knowledge in certain areas only and there are "integrators" who interact with these multiple knowledge islands to create a "product" out of it, then working from home might reduce efficiency. Of course, it would be possible to improve efficiency using technology, but I feel we're not yet there. When we tried out, the current technologies (like webex, etc..) still weren't as good as face to face interaction.
But then, using the current technologies, we've been able to avoid a lot of overseas travel.
working from home...
User Interaction Designer
Bangalore
Industries CSR and Carbon Credits
Thanks for all the responses, Will try and collectivly reply to some of them.
Firstly most of us seem to feel that traveling by bus/group transport could make one look un-presentable thus use a car. -- Sorry that will have to change the real problem here is getting from A to B.
Consider that we cant widen the roads more than what it is. Even if you do, the cars and two wheelers are anyway going to use up that space in no time.
Example : HAL (airport road) we all thought its going to be come free, it was free for about a week. Just an analogy traffic flow is like a gaseous flow system, it will occupy the entire pipe unlike water flow which is sort of organised -- I think TS had made a reference to the term entropy in one of his posts.
The real de-congestion solutions lie in getting the car and two wheeler users to move to public transport or group transport (car pooling) This has to be a multi prong solution
a) User education
b) User Regulation - (Read: Laws)
c) Provision for alternate modes for commute
d) Industry co-operation
I know we don't have a lot of this in our direct control but in my view these have to happen parallel.
But what we do have at PRAJA is the ability to generate public opinion.
I have taken the last point where I feel it takes a Infosys or a Wipro or a Satyam etc.. who can take a firm call and lead by example.
Whats in it for these companies? (not targeting only IT sector any company which has a sizable work force)
If the Finance / HR Departments can work out the math, work with BMTC on special routes possibly co-invest in rolling stock, negotiate better rates they will surely see light at the end of the tunnel even in short time frames.
This could also be taken as a CSR initiative and suitable credit to the industries.
Bonus: Can the Industries claim carbon credits for the fuel saved ?If some environmental expert can give his opinion on this it will not only mean that the Industries are being responsible a large portion of this cost can get offset by selling carbon credits.
To add to this the goodwill that the industries earn -- priceless!
-- Praveen Sundaram AkA PhotoYogi
-- PhotoYogi
back to the same point
Excellent blog, photoyogi. All the same, there's a limit to working from home. And, there's a world beyond IT too.
The answer plainly is good, nay excellent, public bus transport services, the answer for which possibly lies at
http://www.praja.in/banga...
Muralidhar Rao
Great Ideas, Yogi
Good thinking, Yogi.
Yr suggestions are extremely good. You hit the nail squarely on the head.
You've made many good arguments to make cos use public buses for their employees.
The Carbon credits idea is a great one - the world will have to move in this direction since it will never be possible to have enough roads to accommodate every citizen's car.
No matter how much road you build, traffic always has a funny way of flexing it's muscles, locating the empty space & filling up there, obeying some kind of a new theory of expandivity or a new form of murphy's law !
Carbon Trading
I dont think we have to wait too long before Carbon trading starts having a positive effect on a large size IT companies' bottom line.
Did you know that one of the revenue stream for Namma Metro is Carbon Trading? They have already sold their credits!
I wonder what other innovations can be done in Bangalore to capture or reduce Carbon emissions? - Any innovative ideas?