Blogs

On the lines of this water index project, how about a separate group of people come forward to build a public transportation index for Bengaluru? Idea would be to build a single number, publish it month over month or quarter over quarter to show some trends on how public transportation related investments or policy changes are working for our city.

It is tempting to try a traffic and transportation index instead. But public transport is the bigger and better defined service that citizens want to consume. Traffic is a different beast, it caters to movement of goods and private as well as public means of mobility.

Unlike for water domain, transportation area may already have with lot of published data points. Further, thanks to a Wilbur Smith report for MoUD (Central Ministry of Urban Development), a lot of thinking too is available to borrow from.

 Town planning principles are age old. Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) who visited Bangalore in his days, classified the towns in three main categories depending on three stages of development:- 

1. Primary
2. Secondary
3. Tertiary 

Here is a Lewis Mum ford book  “The city in history: its origins, its transformations, and its prospects” review :- 

 Building bus stands on the outskirts of a city is a concept which has been widely developed throughout Tamil Nadu. None of the inter-state buses today enter the interiors of towns like Madurai, Tirunelveli, Dharmapuri and even Chennai has its bus stand quite far away from the main city centre though the city has expanded beyond the present bus stand.

The students of CSIM, Bangalore, are organizing “Learn your way”, an awareness campaign for encouraging Open Schooling in Bangalore. This is an event to sensitize parents, teachers, children and adolescents towards the open schooling concept for a stress free education.

For years now, it has been widely recognized that the mainstream education system in our country is producing more dropouts every year than successful candidates, for various reasons. The recent spate of student suicides in the metro cities has jolted us and made us painfully aware that it is time for the citizens to wake up and act.

And there do exist solutions to these problems. One of them is a parallel system, fully recognized by the Government of India, which caters to the varying levels of intelligence and needs of a child. Through the National Open Schooling system, the largest system of alternate education anywhere in the world, a child can complete education at his/her own pace, with subjects of his/her own choice.

I have read the Bangalore Master Plan 2015 for the first time.

I am happy to see the recommendations made after a structured study. ( Though I would have expected this to have more meat)

At some stage soon, auto-rickshaws & motorcycles will have to be banned or atleast, confined to city's outskirts to streamline traffic within the congested CBDs of Indian cities. Bangalore, with it's relatively richer citizens can perhaps lead the way in this!

A case study report, full of good explanatory maps & photos by Karl Fjellstrom, ITDP (dtd 15-Sep-2008) about how motorcycles were banned in a span of about 16 years can be downloaded from this link on filesanywhere.

Excerpts from this report are worth looking at (especially, the section "Lessons from Guangzhou’s successful motorcycle ban") in relation to our own future needs :

Gradual implementation

Few of the points mentioned in the survey  (in second set) is about bus stands/stops. 

1) Dirty and sad bus stands, do not like waiting there

2) Very hard to walk to and from the Bus Stands

We shall through some light on these items from RCA perspective.

Effect : Do not like waiting there. 

Causes: 

1) No adequate shelter(sad bus stands)

      - Damaged roofing

      - No roofing

 2) Poor furniture

   - Demolishing in progress

   - Repair

   - Damaged or vandalized

   - Unclean and not usable

   - Sharp edges or broken edges

   - Very old

   - No disabled friendly furnitures/path

3) Not Clean due to

     - Spitting (Pan and simple)

The Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) has begun inter-State operations at a new mini bus terminal at Baiyappanahalli on Old Madras Road.

According to K A Rajkumar, Director (Operations), the State-run corporation has constructed a small facility near the old NGEFactory, on a trial basis.

“We have commenced bus services from 19 March on a one-way basis (towards Kolar and Tirupati). About 500 odd buses, including Volvo will ply daily through the new terminus from the City towards destinations such as Kolar, Chintamani, Malur, Chittor, Tirupati and Chennai. The new facility also has 12 bus bays” said Rajkumar. KSRTC will shortly finalise introduction of BMTC onnection to this new facility

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/61031/ksrtc-terminal-baiyappanahalli.html

Poor  publicity  by KSRTC may be due to BBMP election.  Now they should give good advertisment about this.