Getting Serious About Traffic

Its time to stop pussy footing about traffic and get really serious about it. There are going to be no more fundamental advances in traffic engineering. All that remains to be done is implement what has already been discovered. All this knowledge is not even patented or proprietary - any body serious about doing it and with access to a xerox machine should be well equipped to tackle these problems. Road design - quality of asphalt, engineering aspects like drains, curvature, banking angles, amount of curvature for a turn and traffic calming issues like lanes width, intersection design, pedestrian facilities etc are already well thought and solved problems in the west. By well solved problem I mean academic research in the west no more looks at these types of problems. Western govt agencies- both state and national- responsible for roads and traffic have published design guidelines and manuals that contain even minute details. Several of these technical details are even the law. There are going to be no more fundamental advances in these areas. All that remains to be done is implement what has already been discovered. All this knowledge is not even patented or proprietary. its all available open source. This is not to say that western countries have solved the problem of traffic jams and congestion. Those are constrained by more global issues like politics, oil lobby, public transit private transit etc. but they have mastered road design and traffic engineering to a 'T'. They have reduced it to a science. They can look at a situation and come up with solutions with guaranteed metrics. If you do this and this, then so many vehicles per hour at this speed can use this road. There might be some give and take, but they can still make good conservative estimates. And this comes about mainly due to design. Not driver attitudes. Yes, there is a tendency for erratic driving behavior even in the west. But the mean behavior is that of orderly driving. This is principally due to design and has nothing to do with the white man and other cultural issues. The roads are designed such that even a dumbo is forced to drive according to the rules. Poorly designed roads see many erratic drivers even in the west. There are some fundamental differences between how cities in the west are laid out and how cities like bangalore are laid out. But western cities also share conditions that operate in Bangalore. As wide as they are even western roads are subject to space constraints, and heavy volumes. For example, America is country of > 250 million cars when the population of America is itself ~ 350 million. That’s more than one car per person eligible to drive. American coastal cities see heavy volumes that rival those of typical Indian cities. Now one ready reckoner excuse in India is about mixed traffic type. As if design and all is perfect, but for these damned two wheelers and autos. Yet there exists not one Indian city whose average traffic moves faster than a 1961 suvega. What I am saying is that even though many conditions are similar, the fundamental difference between what they have and what we have is that they take design seriously and consequently managed to structure their traffic flow much better than us. As a first step, what we can do create posts of traffic engineers in our cities and then get few experts from the west to conduct a series of training sessions for these traffic engineers. Instead of sending 100s of our mantris to the west to study traffic, we can get 10s of western experts to India to train our traffic engineers. If the mantris are interested even they can sit in. In this age of Google Earth and Youtube you donot need to be in west to understand how west travels. All you need is somebody who can compile a relevant list of visuals to see. Next, make 1000s of Xerox copies of road design and traffic control manuals in the west and distribute them freely to all and sundry who are interested. Why western experts are there no Indian experts? No there are not. Just like the western academicians, Indian academicians are interested in hi-fi stuff like congestion modeling, stochastic processes etc. The day-to-day daily grease and grime stuff like intersection design they are not interested in, neither are their protégés. But in the west there are a good number of experts in the form of experienced traffic engineers who have solved real problems while we have none. < href =http://youtube.com/results?search_query=Gridlock+Sam&search=Search> Look for “GridLock Sam” in Youtube