deepakar - 20 March, 2013 | Bangalore | cycling | Complaint | cycle infrastructure | WTC | Brigade

Brigade Group's World Trade Center claims to be " The best address your office could have in Bangalore". Ask anyone who cycles to their workplace in this elite location and you'll probably get a snigger. I've been working at a company that has leased office space in WTC for nearly one and a half years now. At work, we have a small group of people who like to commute to work on their bicycles, and each of us have had multiple frustrating experiences with the people who manage this facility.

First, despite all the tall claims about being a world class facility, it's been a struggle for us to even get a proper parking facility. For the first few months after the facility opened, there was simply no place to park the bikes. Later on they did install some infrastructure involving bars and chains seemingly designed to secure the cycles. However, it was in a completely dark unguarded place. There were at least two thefts that I can recall and on reporting those to the Brigade authorities we only received an indifferent reply that said nothing about what was being addressed and how. One of my colleagues who had secured his bike against a post lost his saddle not once but twice and had to take his bike back in an auto rickshaw. 

A few months later we did get a security guard who was stationed near this parking facility, and that only made things worse. Every morning we had to fight with the guard - a new one each time- who would insist that the parking was not meant for cyclists. They would ask us to leave the bikes untethered and we eventually had to resort to "I'm parking here. Do what you have to do!". The security situation was soon to get a little more bizarre. One fine morning a couple of months ago, they stopped allowing cyclists from the main gates. We had to go around the vast campus and enter through a service gate tucked away at the side. After we escalated this issue, apart from posting on Brigade's facebook wall and sending mails to their PR, they started allowing the cyclists in through all the gates. There was a twist; only the bikers with fancy riding gear and expensive-looking bikes were allowed in through the main gates. It's surprising that the builders can get away with this kind of apartheid!

The status now is that Brigade has finally solved most of these problems (including discriminating between cyclists), but it's disappointing that it took us a over a year to set things straight. The roads and public places of Bangalore are hostile enough already to dissuade people from taking up cycling, but it's hard to accept progressive institutions aiming at the highest standards make it so hard. The total number of cyclists that commute to my place of work would fit their bikes in two car-parking slots. We don't contribute to the noise or the pollution in the campus and we're unlikely to injure anyone. And most of are passionate enough to motivate other people to take up biking. But it's hard to tell someone to sign up to become a second class citizen! 

 

 

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