Traffic & Transportation Policies and Strategies

Executive Summary of a Wilbur Smith study on Traffic & Transportation Policies and Strategies in Urban Areas in India is now available on the website of Ministry of Urban Development. The 20 page summary document makes a good reading.

Praja members would love the language, especially the terms like "slow moving vehicle index", "on-street parking interference index". Essentially, they have quantified stuff like "entropy", "edge friction", "turbulence" and "viscosity" that we often borrow and use here at Praja from thermo and fluid dynamics. Some equations for example:

• Parking Interference Index = 1/ (w1 x % of major road length used for on-street parking + w2 x onstreet parking demand on major roads. Fair enough, though I worry if its should be road length or road width or road area used for on-street parking. How to measure on-street parking demand too is tricky. that itself is a function of availability of public transport.
• Slow Moving Vehicle Index = [(W1 x Availability of cycle tracks)+ (w2 x SMV share in trips)]. Fair enough again, only one point though. They have added cycles and slow moving vehicles (SMV) here, I would add a weight for pedestrians as well. That would be a function of availability of pedestrian walkway width available along major roads. They already have a walkability index
• Walkability Index: is calculated as [(W1 x Availability of footpath)+ (w2 x Pedestrian Facility rating)]. Okay.

There is a mother of all "Congestion Index" as well which is defined as: Mobility Index = 1- (A/M), where:

• A - Average journey speed observed on major corridors of the city during peak hours and
• M - Desirable Average journey speed on major road networks of a city during peak hour, which is assumed as 30 KMPH.

That's it - 30 kmph?? I do Whitefield to J P Nagar (25 km) in 60 minutes even today. Looks like I should be happy with that :)

There also is a "City Bus supply index", defined as City Bus Fleet per 1 lakh population. Refer our discussions here on how Bangalore has good number of buses, yet low bus usage, arguably because of poorly done routing. Shouldn't routing plan or spread supply a weight to this city Bus Supply Index. No surprises that Bangalore (39) is third after Delhi (43), Madurai (42) in public transport availability), where as Mumbai (16) comes much below. I am not criticizing this index, only trying to understand the purpose of it. Perhaps it is to show that City Bus count itself has no correlation to quality or usage of public transport.

There is some other nice stuff in there. Like:

• The equation for Trip length takes "shape factor" into account. Shape factor is ration of minimum spread to maximum spread. Mumbai would be low, and Bangalore high on this factor.
• The equation for Public Transport percentage Slum population as a proxy variable to account for low income households. So true. If a city has 20% population in low income bracket, and public transport usage is 20%, that could tell you that income is only factor driving the usage, and quality offered may not be good.

Anyway, read and digest what is available to us (executive summary), and let us discuss this in context of what we have been discussing here for past few months. Recommended reading for all traffic geeks.