Road Widening and Homeowner Pains

The BBMP has marked 216 roads for widening.

As someone has tweeted recently, widening roads for increasing traffic is akin to loosening one's belt as a solution for obesity.

How long will this help ? Wider roads - smoother traffic for a while - encourages more to drive - back to square one! A year's benefit, at most ? The sprawl problems in city after city have proven beyond doubt that merely wider roads are no solution for traffic issues. To make people lose their homes, land, etc permanently for a short term gain is extremely duh. Especially when done by an authority which has not shown that its solutions have actually improved traffic sustainably in any part of town. the Silk Board, Bannerghata Circle, Nimhans stretch - all are as bad as ever. Traffic has a way of catching up real quick. Without demonstrating a more wholesome plan for a long term traffic management solution, its downright horrible to destroy homes etc. 

There's another point to the whole story. Even if widening work does happen, it should not be done for private transport. The extra space needs to be marked for public transport, pedestrians and cyclists. There are many stretches - Haralur Road where we live being one such - where walking is a nightmare, and there is a proposal to make it wider so vehicles can zip even faster. Its a recipe for more pedestrian fatalities in the imminent future.

My home is not impacted by this TDR mess, but I fully intend to lend my voice and support to those who're protesting this. BBMP, grow up and think of solutions. You cannot fight cancer using band aids, and certainly not band aids that help the growth of that cancer itself!

Posted via email from bangalorekaapi

Underpass, overpromised, overchieved!

BBMPs "Magic Box" has been in the news for a while now, and is now nearly there.

It got ravaged by the press, at lest the TOI. Poor guys made the mistake of being transparently optimistic and said it'd take a mere 72 hours - but that became 33 days by the time it got done.

33 days - are you kidding me? When was the last time one saw any infrastructural project in Bangalore get done inside of 6 months - leave alone 33 days ? Even el-simplo stuff like relaying sidewalks took months together - and often got abandoned midway.

We got to give credit where its due - and in this case its definitely due! Kudos BBMP - this leaves me with a lot of optimism for further, quick improvements where bottlenecks are spotted. Perhaps, just perhaps, Bangalore is starting to learn how to manage its new expanded size.

[ Aside : reminds one a lot of the software industry - young, inexperiences enthusiasm genuinely imagines tasks getting over "by Wednesday" and 2 weeks later gets a lot of flak for being late for stuff that would've taken 3 weeks anyhow. ]