Urban Planning and the Whitefield Area

The Whitefield area which I am taking to include areas like parts of Bangalore between ORR, KR Puram Whitefield Road, HAL Varthur Road and Whitefield Main Road iteself is today notorious for its horrendous traffic and grid lock while having a large chunk of bangalore's vaunted IT industry, and expensive tracts of housing in well manicured communities.  In the midst of these modern developments, do not be surprised to find two room schools, old village centers with a grand old village center tree and narrow lanes of the old villages in the area, and vast parts without proper water and sewage service. The whole situation begs the question as to how things turned out this way/ Was there no planing?

Planning and traffic flow and mobility are very much interlinked.  We have large gated communities that are islands unto themselves, serving as a barrier between some interior area and the main road. Poor water supply situation means that roads are full of tankers.  Large schools in locations with poor road connectivity means that early morning roads are choked with school buses.  

Since CDP 2035 is under preparation and the gpovernment of the day shows no signs of complying with the 74th amendment and constituting a true Metropolitan Planning Agency, it is worthwhile to look at what happened with the old CDPs. Here are some facts that stunned me

In CDP 1995, the HAL Varthur Road and KR Puram Whitefield road are both proposed to be widened to 45 meters.  This is double of the present road width where we have absolutely choked traffic. (I will add pictures soon). The notorious graphite India junction which is probably the hardest signal to clear in the mornings and the one choked entrance to EPIP from Kundalahalli side was supposed to be have THREE parallel roads for traffic instead of the pathetic single road in existence today which lterally funnels the entire EPIP traffic in.

There are many other examples to cite when one goes through the CDP.  Wider interior roads, proposed roads that never materialized and are now heavily built up areas. This is a skeleton draft which I will expand on in the next couple of days.