How Industry can help reduce traffic congestion

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.. 

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

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. 

SB,

I'm not sure if you're aware of the cess on petrol we bangaloreans are paying towards infrastructure, including for metro. 

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. 

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.

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

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.

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 !