SB,

Will try. Its dense, especially the weights and the fact that some basline data is inaccurate.

ASJ

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Found it...

http://www.livemint.com/2007/11/05000313/What8217s-wrong-with-babus.html

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alrighty. thanks.

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my understanding is that people at helm know. they atleast know where to look for solutions. to get a peek at how much they know, check designs of PRR. the issue is they dont have the public trust to back them up or the accountability to keep them monitored. their own personal fortunes are neither tied to solutions or performance. some wierd un-measurable variables they are tied to. as bialterminal or was it sandeep who said align personal good with personal good and see the magic happen.

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Just re-read what I wrote over my afternoon coffee. Too geeky isn't it. Man, lets do something like this as the inaugural post on our almost-ready gyan/infopedia section.

Lets start with a list of key variables playing on the roads (entropy, edge friction, volume (population - number of particles), and pressure (enforcement, fear) etc

• Road width
  
  • wider, more disorderliness. Narrower, better organized
  • Weight - medium
• Markings and paintings
  • Heavy the signage, better order
  • Weight - low, but a function of enforcement
• on-street parking - long duration (residences)
  
  • More parking, better the order. Cars one behind another is a sign of order, isn't it.
  • Weight - ?
• on-street parking - short duration (darshinis, ATMs etc)
  • Order supplied by lined up cars and narrower road gets over compensated by constantly parking and de-parking cars.
  • weight - ?
• Consistency of road width
  • More consistent, better the order. Narrow to wide, or wide to narrow, both scenarios lead to disorder.
  • Weight - High
• Range of speed (diff b/w slowest moving and fastest moving vehicle).Giving a new color to the Wilbur Smith's SMV (slow moving vehicles) index
  
  • Higher the range, more the disorder
  • Weight - high
• Presence of Hard median
• Average distance between cuts in the median
• Percentage of law breakers (need to break this further into - percentage of guys over that over-speed, percentage that overtakes from left, percentage that parks illegally)

List is big, and its not that easy to draw one because things are so interconnected. The challenge is to see their effects in isolation (via some intuitive thinking and extrapolation).

Did you ask whats the objective of all this? 1) To find out what variable should get how much investment. So, influence policy decisions. 2) Which one of these is higher priority and higher impact. Its not possible to one shot invest in all, thats a bit impractical given our structure.

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thanks a lot man. put them on a tree. i think dependency tree should tell us what is fundamental and what is symptomatic. you will also see all are related. then the issue is going top-down or bottom-up the tree. at the very least this will us to think about these issues in clear terms. again thanks.

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city connect type of issue is two sided. liability and accountability. that is why organized design and decision making. role of citizens is in evaluation - as a watchdog - and cannot be generation of policy/design etc... nevertheless, given the reality of our cities citizens have to intervene. there have been some discussions on these types of issues previously. ORR, BTM layout, Indira nagar, Hebbal etc etc... some of which got featured in Deccan Herald. usually impossible to design each part of the network in isolation. realistic designs require data, taste and experience. but it need not be intractable. somethings have to be fixed. classify city road types. since lane systems are non existent. 6m, 9m, 12m and so on. estimate realistic handling capacity of each road type - ideal case, true averages that is the basis. what i have observed in some of the organized towns is that there are certain basic inviolable rules. the cost of a project is the cost of adhering to these rules and the benefit is order and controllability. once these basic rules are fixed then designs are pretty much fixed atleast at the macro levels. the only decision making is in assessing local conditions and network connectivity and picking from a pool of possible solutions. to repeat, once a particular solution is picked, then what needs to be done is pretty much known as design of that solution is mostly fixed. this also means that since the solution bank is fixed, the city is retrofitted around the possible solutions. (i know you know all these things, just putting out my understanding out.)

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Ramesh Ramanathan of Jaanagrahaa one put up a 3 step test for local politicians.. I think it needs to apply to city planning authorities as well.. It goes something like this.. (he said it a lot better, I will try to find the link)

1) Does he admit there is a problem?

2) Does he admit not having a solution himself?

3) Is he willing to accept outside help to fix things.

I believe city planners know there is a problem and they dont have all the solutions. What does it take for them to accept suggestions evaluate and implement them. I am willing to track the Ramaiah junction reengineering suggestion. I am sure it will not see the light of the day.

What does it take?

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design tests that help alleviate problems. say if we do the test. if 99 of 100 fail the ramanathan test. then what? test governance and systems instead. given who people are, do you have systems that ensure that people in charge and paid for ... 1) admit there is a problem. 2) admit they dont have a solution themselves. 3) willing to accept outside help to fix things. i.e., do the ramanathan tests on systems not on people. that would be longer lasting solution.

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How accurate are these figures when compared with ground realities? Look at Pune - the reality is that public transport is pathetic and the figures suggest that Pune has the best transport facilities - accessibility 3.15, % trips accessible in 15 minutes 54.3. And they seem to manage this with a supply index of 16.43? The graph below the table from where these figures come from also suggests Pune to fare better than Chennai, Mumbai and other cities with better reputation, just based on this, I am unable to accept the study and its overall validity.

Results are always flawed when lot of proxy outcomes are used - this study is an example of that. Also figures without confidence intervals are useless (most transporty journal articles report these).

Further, access and accessibility are two different things. This study uses the latter as a measure not the former.

Given that Pune has relatively short but disproportionately high number of routes getting to a bus stop within 15 minutes gives a brilliant score. But in reality the average frequency of a bus in Pune across all routes is - one bus per 57 minutes!! 

If PMT were to follow these figures, one conclusion they may draw is that Pune needs more buses - well! We know that does not help in any way based on the situation in Bangalore.

As Fritz Perls put it 'the whole is more than the sum of its parts'. Without a wider perspective on things, conclusions based on small peice meal stats can be very misleading.

ASJ

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An interesting find of the study is the colossal investment that needs to go into public transport services. Like I have stated earlier, it is an opportunity that no industry leader can afford to ignore - Devesh sahab - kyaa kar rahein hein aap???

Muralidhar Rao

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I too am not quite sure about ther veracity of many aspects of the study. Though somewhere it has stated that Kochi is causing a distortion in its summarisation, admitting, in a way, that there is something peculiar about the bus transport services in that city, the other factors listed do not seem to project it correctly.

I am very familiar with Kochi bus services, having used it extensively myself, even with having any number of cars at my disposal whenever I visit the place (I was born in Kochi, and lived there upto the age of 11, and visit the city often since I have many relatives there). For a city that keeps opting for Marxist rule almost continuously, it has a near total privately operated public bus service. It is cheap, efficient and clean. But, the downside, as Sreevatsa had pointed out earlier, is its notorious record, vis-a-vis safety, which can possibly be matched only by Delhi's blue-line. The reason is also the same - the government's licence-permit regime. If liberated from the government's strangle-hold, the city could indeed provide a model for the rest of the country.

Muralidhar Rao

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Good thing sir. Times of India has picked this thing today. Frontpage, top right corner. You are making them put complicated things like this on frontpage

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Rejoice Tarle!! The full report is there on MoUD website now. Putting it on my phone as we speak. See http://urbanindia.nic.in/moud/programme/ut/main.htm and download before it disappears from there. 149 pages, so be warned.

No, I didn't pull any strings, I don't have any. Perhaps some helpful chap at MoUD listened to us :)

Hey Swamy - TOI didn't pick it from here. the right statement would be - we both picked up the paper from MoUD. I just did it a few days sooner. But see how different the headlines are. "Bangalore is worst in bla bla .." for TOI. And "bla bla policies and strategies" here at Praja. Geeks will be geeks, though we have to learn the art of headline making to expand our reach :)

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Oh, forgot to add. The 3.5 MB heavy and 150 pages annexure has the meat of it - I mean the data which forms the basis for their studies and calculations - so don't forget to download it as well. Happy reading.

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thanks man. got it.

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I dont know if y'all missed this... made for interesting reading today.

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ids, asj, tarle, murali - I haven't managed to go through the full report yet. Too long, needs some more time to finish.

If anyone has goe or even browsed through the report and annexure, will be nice to start a separate post just to discuss its contents.

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Either Naveen or myself or both had saved all the files. I will look them up tonight, and upload on scribd.

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Its on MoUD website, here. big PDF (149 pages). Have saved this one too. Look for "Transport Indices", on page "ix"

http://www.urbanindia.nic.in/programme/ut/final_Report.pdf

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