One convincing reason for us to use public transport and bicycles

Fantastic, Shaastriavare! I am broadcasting this to the world.

 

Muralidhar Rao

I must congratulate you on the wonderful pics!  They so eloquently tell the story of mismanagement of resources by the elite, whose sins of ommission and/or commission impact the lives of the majority.

 

However the time has long come to change that and not let the elite minority get away with such decisions.  The common man is no less a stakeholder in the sustainability of his environment.  

 

It is well-known that people's involvement is vital to effective public policy.  But in our case we are getting more and more alienated...

 

We need to voice our opinions much more vociferously than before and try to take to task our elected representatives, especially at the local Municipal level.

 

It was this coordinated public voice that could make an elected Municpality toe the line in Mexico City and ban all motor vehicular traffic from the inner regions of the city, some years ago, in an effort to contain the traffic snarls.

 

Here, our leaders are too busy feathering their own nests, to even dream of saving the city and its people from the massive vehicular population...

Rather the RTO makes hay and traffic unleashes havoc on the streets...

 

Then we can do carpooling..for blr folks there was an interesting news article today..

http://www.indiaprwire.com/pressrelease/internet/200803288396.htm

So, bus is the answer - more importantly, better buses and good services. But, clearly, that cannot happen if left to government monopolies, or even the BLUELINE (Delhi) kind of operations - the organised sector has to be brought in. For more, read: http://bangalore.praja.in... Muralidhar Rao

Some bus pictures - operating even on narrow roads with exclusivity. http://flickr.com/photos/13879352@N07/sets/72157604323887134/ Why can we not have the same ?? PS: I request someone to pls display the pics here, if possible. [Done. -Admin.]

The population of Bengaluru is too large in contrast with European cities who use such bus services.

mcadambi - those pictures with narrow lanes are probably from cities in South /Central America & not from European cities.

Also, many large cities have adapted BRTS, with some services surely being operated on narrow lanes with exclusivity :

 

Cities (population above 10 lakhs) with operational BRTS :

Country  City  Population

Australia  Brisbane  18 lakhs

Australia  Adelaide  11 lakhs

Australia  Sydney  43 lakhs

Brazil  Curitiba  17 lakhs

Brazil  Sao Paulo  109 lakhs

Canada  Ottawa  11 lakhs

Chile  Santiago  54 lakhs

China  Beijing  85 lakhs

China  Changzhou  21 lakhs

China  Guangzhou  76 lakhs

China  Hangzhou  64 lakhs

China  Huaian  52 lakhs

China  Kunming  57 lakhs

China  Shanghai  144 lakhs

China  Shenzhen  82 lakhs

China  Taichung  10 lakhs

China  Xian  27 lakhs 

Colombia  Bogota  70 lakhs

Ecuador  Guayaquil  38 lakhs

Ecuador  Quito  18 lakhs

France  Paris  120 lakhs

France  Toulouse  11 lakhs

Guatemala  Guatemala City  12 lakhs

Holland  Amsterdam  14 lakhs

Indonesia  Jakarta  83 lakhs

Japan  Nagoya  22 lakhs

Mexico  Mexico City  87 lakhs

Mexico  Monterrey  11 lakhs

Mexico  Leon  13 lakhs

Peru  Lima  76 lakhs

S Africa  Capetown  35 lakhs

S Korea  Jinan  59 lakhs

S Korea  Seoul  103 lakhs

Taiwan  Kaohsiung  15 lakhs

Taiwan  Taipei  26 lakhs

Tanzania  Dar-es-Salaam  25 lakhs

Thailand  Bangkok  57 lakhs

USA  Las Vegas  17 lakhs

USA  Miami  41 lakhs

USA  Boston  44 lakhs

USA  Los Angeles  129 lakhs

USA  Orlando  20 lakhs

USA  Pittsburgh  28 lakhs

Venezuela  Caracas  27 lakhs

Vietnam  Hanoi  34 lakhs

Vietnam  Saigon  64 lakhs

Santsub - thanks.

Pune is the pioneer in India for this concept - cheers to them ! Understanding this concept, & realising it's benefits will take some time in India as most are unaware & feel that it wont work because "road space would be taken away, what we require is more road space". However, the truth is actually quite different as pictures at the beginning illustrate the reality very well.

There are cities that are more congested than bangalore that are using this system & moving people very well, but sadly, this type of transport, which is the most economical & cost-effective, has too many critics & few supporters.

The authorities also fear the public & the media's reaction & have not even begun any test or trials yet.

pardon the long post. this turned out longer than imagined. naveen that is a comprehensive list. a good reference list. i think i know where you are headed. some months ago i started a small list on metro. abandoned it midway after a system crash. i wanted to compile population, total network length, network length by mode, ridership by mode for a few cities. a few heavy cities, few medium ones and a few light ones. then we can see if the network density has any effect on effectiveness of public transport. i have a suspicion that irrespective of the mode, network length is important for effectiveness. not just in the obvious way, but in terms of self sustenance and effectiveness. just 1 line here and another there even if on the densest corridor will not cut it. ridership is a function of network size. coverage is very very important. in that list i suspect some cities with just HOV lanes to show have sneaked in. if we do effectiveness trips_by_buses/total_trips type of tests, i bet half these cities will come cropper. for example, in the us there are quite a number of cities which are trying to solve the rush hour problem and have self righteously come up with these HOV lanes without doing anything about transit itself. things like car pooling are outcomes of that type of thinking. cute sounding, but nothing more. how many cars do you have to pool to solve hosur road problem? bus systems in the us atleast are a big joke. if you follow the metrics and usage stats in fha reports on bus systems and look at their metrics, you will die laffing. laskmeshwara in gadag district has more ridership than what these folks are trying to achieve. ok rhetoric, but the point is, even if i may not have been comprehensive, i have not seen any designs in fha reports capable of handling more than 20 people at a stop. and these guys go by the book. in the pic SB posted there are more than 20 people in the middle of a bridge waiting for a bus. but bus systems have their advantages. infinitely flexible and reconfigurable. thus can be very responsive. and they have a reach which ROW systems can only dream of. but they are not for long hauls and for high volumes. It is a misnomer to call what ever they are going to do on ORR as BRTS. RITES' prescription is to reuse existing intersections rather than redesign them to facilitate BRTS, when the entire game of BRTS is in intersection design to achieve quazi ROW. midblock ROW is fine, but if you cant negotiate an intersection in good time, there is no way this thing is going to be rapid. and unless it is rapid, there is no way it can serve as a good long haul solution. Average trip distance in bangalore is 9kms. for reference, silkboard to electronic city is 9 kms. at the far end of hosur road, at points south of electronics city, there are 30k vehicles. how many buses do you need to solve hosur road? what about the mother of all high volume roads in bangalore, bellary road? yeshwantpura or even ORR? again, i may be wrong. but murali and vasanth (god bless their souls) have been dropping crucial data points on buses in blr -- whether it is bmtc abandoning grids, or ellideera. these might be outliers, but i have been making a living out of saying that outliers are nothing but un-modeled dynamics so i have to make my case on this one. here is my HYPOTHESIS. bmtc is finding it difficult to do long haul. with increasing congestion it has become very difficult for it to perform at any meaningful level of service. grids are taking long and ellideera is revealing embarassing stats, for example. so they dropped both of them. much of all this is due to the reality of blr. there is a very high volume of private vehicles. as many imaginary pitched battles i have fought with erstwhile justice saldhana, i agree with him when he says that the palike cutting thousands of trees has not translated to even a 1% improvement for bangalore. on a similar train of thought, it would be very very interesting to figure out how many buses are there too. piecewise, adhoc solutions are not the way to go. my basic diagnosis is this: we all know what the design levels of bangalore's roads. what this means is, per kilometer the entropy(chaos) levels on the roads are the same through out the city on an average. as you increase the trip length, entropy(chaos) adds up. which means any given metric, like reliability, trip times etc etc all have high variance, aka uncertainty. and high variance is bad news for metrics. i would love to sink my teeth on bmtc records, ticket sales, trip lengths, trip times etc etc and test this hypothesis against that. i am fairly certain, that my hypothesis will hold up. and yet bmtc has concentrated on long haul. when the contributors of entropy is short haul trip count. here is a pointed question- would blr be better if bmtc concentrates of intra hub transit and let all inter hub transit to ROW systems?

Ts,

Can I send a mail to you with details? The study details are in files (excel, etc.). If yes, can you figure out my email-id from my profile?

TS, assuming uniform chaos (entropy) on all the roads, the theory about predictability going down with distance is correct.

One mistake being made all around is widening of roads without any serious measure to control the entropy. Without lane and parking discipline, widened roads only provide more space for particles to move and knock around thus increasing the entropy. More shrunk the space, lesser the chaos as particles are forced to observe order.

Some examples of this theory. 1) Sarakki road (connects Jayanagar 9th block to J P Nagar). Its a narrow road which you would think will get jammed any moment, but it doesn't. Because anyone parking on the side, thus blocking the road, is immediately made aware of his misdeed by the first obstructed vehicle/driver. 2) Widened road that goes through Marathahalli. There is more space on the roads now, extreme lefts are used for halting, parking and walking. There are umpteen cuts in the divider, which no-one minds as drivers 'feel' they can always drive around the vehicles waiting to take U-turns. Net result is a widened road gone waste even though you "feel" as if Marathahalli has become easier to drive through.

Fighting this entropy is important, there is no way to work around it. The expensive ways are to build things like toll roads over storm water drains, elevated roads over highly chaotic areas (Metro too, isn't it). And these expensive projects have to planned well, they need to provide end-to-end low entropy "corridors", otherwise you may create few but very heavy unmanageable points of chaos. The cheaper ways would involve working systematically on selected corridors to reduce entropy. This could require

BMTC is neither in position to hasten implementation of the expensive options, nor the cheaper options. Not sure if BMLTA would be in a position to do that either. Perhaps, Kasturiranga committee's MPC offers the hope.

Wiki defines BRT as:

BRT attempts to combine the advantages of a metro system (exclusive right-of-way to improve punctuality and frequency) with the advantages of a bus system (low construction and maintenance costs, does not require exclusive right-of-way for entire length, at least at the beginning).

Compared to standard bus service BRT systems with dedicated right-of-way and thus an increased average transport speed can provide more passenger-miles with the same number of rolling stock and personnel. They also offer the prospect of a more fluent ride than a normal bus immersed in stop-and-go traffic.

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Exlusive right of way? In what way does BMTC now not have this? They are always a menace on the road...overtaking from left right and center..in some parts of blr we instead need to have 'non-brt' to let other vehicles move peacefully..not to be under the fear of getting mowed down..

Also cops maintain their right of way by letting the last bus through before stopping traffic on a lane!

one take away for us is to have the above displayed type of partitioning for the busbays..to contain them at the busstops where they are the most dangerous!

Thanks for the encouragement Naveen. I agree that the image of BMTC is not great amongst the bangaloreans. Both BMTC and public have a stake in this issue.

I have always felt that its the people's attitude and temparament that matters most. Let me just compare the statements of a Bangalorean and Mumbaikar on public transport-

Mumbaikar: " Oh the roads are damn crowded, pushing my vehicle through is stressful, distances are really long, parking problems, humid weather, etc.... Let me stick to train, bus, auto, taxi as others do!!!"

Bangalorean: "Oh the roads are damn crowded, Will the BMTC mammoth push through this? No way!! I can atleast take my two wheeler on to the footpath, do some circus and somehow reach office as others do. Distances are manageable and weather is good. so, 2 wheeler/car zindabad!!!". More than 50% of bangalore residents will give another excuse- "Oh I cant read the kannada route boards which BMTC use"

The thing is, who is willing to co-operate? Where to start? How to convince them? and Who will convince them? It has a tendency to get into a deadlock.

There is so much of inertia in the people(for valid reasons, sometimes personal and egoistic like - The "I can afford" factor,etc... ). We know the revolt of parents against the "safe route to school" initiative. Remarks were like "Anything, but not BMTC". Did the initiative work and is still going??(sorry to ask this as I dont know what happened later)

Any steps from BMTC will fail because all buses invariably have to travel on the same roads and people think as I told above. People will obviously not use any BMTC facility from day one. Existing traffic + More BMTC buses means more traffic -> means more time through BMTC. For 2 wheelers, time taken will not differ significantly, thanks to their innovative, yet menacing driving skills. So the final feedback/inference is that the new initiative by BMTC proves ineffective. Traffic problems worsen.

One more thing is the distance factor. After doing all circus in Mumbai, the output is good and encouraging to the people. They(Even I) feel good to have traversed 25+ kms in an hour and feel its worth the trouble. That sort of feeling can really drive people towards public transport. In b'lore, you do all circus and track back to see that you have covered 10 or 12 kms (only if there are no Vatals/ Gowdas/ Kharges/ Yeddy's durbars on the road). To a large extent, the geography of mumbai also contributes to the efficiency. Run 50 buses from say dahisar or borivali to bandra or dadar (which means minimum 12 areas covered); You feel that the city is connected so well! But you see our 201 or 501, you dont get this feeling, right? I think its not apt to blame only BMTC. People need to care more for the city they live in. The pity is also that for more than half the population, bangalore is not "their city", so the "who cares" attitude is also more.

I think i'll post more under the thread "Suvarna peak hour service feedback"

Suraj

Ts, I have sent the details.

Admin, thanks for the info.