There was a report in the Hindu today that a book on guidelines for construction and maintenance of city roads was released yesterday. The author is a retired chief engineer of the PWD, Sri K. N. Shivashankara Rao. This will be an excellent book to get a copy of and review. Is geometrical design covered? Are pedestrian facilities covered? How about utilities?
Wonder if Suhas has access to a copy. It would be good to work with Sri Shivashankara to release a second edition and run a drive to make it the mandatory standard for all road works within Bangalore
Oh, and here is the link.
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Not aware of this road guidelines
Thanks Sanjay, No am not aware of this. Prof. Sitharam (CiSTUP) had expressed some interest in working together on the document I was preparing and we could release it in a similar fashion for Bangalore. But has not moved much forward, probably for want of somebody (student) to work on it.
When I had me Shri Jai Prasad (BBMP), he too had prepared a document as guidance for roads. His complaint was nobody read his document. I think that is the issue here. We have IRC guidelines and nobody reads those either. So I think this will meet a similar fate.
I would love to get my hands on this however - I would read it for sure :)
The way to get this to work is to have a document and follow it up by a number of workshop sessions at the Executive engineer level. Unless that is done, it is hard to get it internalised and make it work across the city.
The document also needs to be very well presented, not only in its completeness of information but the way it is organised. Otherwise it becomes very painful at the engineer level to use it.
Suhas
Trick to enforcing standards
Agree that this is the tricky area - getting any of these standards to be complied with. The Workshop concept is good. Maybe CiSTUP can be one agency that can help to push for standardization. What is the procedure followed by BBMP for a given road now? Who does the engineering? Who approves? Does a consultant do all the work like for the BDA with BBMP as a monitoring body? Once the process is clear, we can see how to propose improvements or where to influence.
four years and still looking
four years and still looking for it?