Transport Challenged People of Bangalore

congratulations sudhir on a well written article - very accessible. perhaps these collection of articles are worth atleast a couple of solid journal papers. yours is the first paper i have read that talks about the cost of transportation in bangalore as a significant fraction of household income. that is a startling statistic that puts a lot of things into perspective. for one, it brings the only public transport we have- BMTC in direct focus. one on side BMTC is showing +ve balances for the past few years primarily due to over subscription and perhaps due the fact it has one of the highest(even if rationalized) rates any where in india. now it is significant that bmtc is self sufficient, but when it costs so much to its primary customer base, as you have pointed out, one wonders if we have the cart before the bull. it will useful if you an provide some references about how much it costs in some of the better managed cities. my empirical evidence is it costs a similar fraction in all places where the stress is on balancing books. but as you said, the impact of that fraction on TCP is perhaps more critical than the rest of the population. praja member murali has been tirelessly evangelizing some reforms in bus transport. please check him out. he is prolific and has written a number of commentaries but his point article about bus service reforms is here. and then we have these periodic slum clearance & rehabilitation drives. understandable, but it also comes with the history of ejipura ews houses. people in those houses are prolly a slight notch above the slum dwellers, but seeing the same problem recur year after year and govt's apathy to finding a solution to the problem, one gets an impression that they are not interested in solving the problem but in eliminating the "problem". also, how do you propose to tackle the issue of sprawl? how do you propose that the city move from the 40x60 culture to a more respectable density? and how do you balance the density with energy? just talking about FSI gets a lot of people drooling about high rises. but where is the energy to drive all those elevators, pull all that water, drain all that sewage. also can we increase the density without upgrading the roads for example, not to mention the pipes? i have suspicion pune started off well as far as density went. 3-4 story residential buildings. no lifts. bigger plots with nice sized flats. it will be great if you can connect all this with what bangalore is planning to do (CTTP, CDP etc). thanks.