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sandeepmr - 29 August, 2008 | Traffic | Bangalore | Bangalore | Road Works | Roads | lanes | Analysis
Spotted a video on Flickr uploaded by some visitor probably on his way to the airport. I don’t recognize the road in the video (not because I have been out of Bangalore for some time now), because all the roads and more importantly the road conditions are strikingly similar nowadays.
Quick observations:
- Typical ~80ft road bordered by medium height compound walls, leaning over the road trees, broken-dug out pavements/sidewalks.
- Absolutely no road markings of any kind other than a road hump which looks like an oddly places ped-xing. Not even a road divide marking, forget the lanes.
- vehicles begin driven dangerously close to each other on opposite lanes haphazardly passing each other in both the directions.
- Vehicles/carts being pushed in direction opposite to traffic on the wrong side.
- And obviously since there’s no space on the pavements the peds spilling on the road risking their lives.
I left Bangalore ~5 years back and I spend more than a few hours every day going thru news, blogs, forums following the proposed projects, and dev news for the city. Being in a different country has definitely changed my perspective on how i look at my city and I worry more about it now than ever.
Queries:
- Are most of the roads in blore in a similar condition or worse even today? where’s all the development happening then?
- I do read about the monos and the metros and the elevated roads, but don’t we also need to concentrate on improving the ground level existing roads more strictly and make them more navigable. There is re-asphalting and widening going on but the road i see in the video is the same I saw 5 years ago with no change.
- Peds are given least priority even today which clearly shows in the announcement that there will be no skywalks or subways on NH7 till 2011. So its taken for granted people are going to die till then.
- Letter from Amsterdam posted a few days back clearly talks about focusing the attention on improving road sense and ground level public transit (Buses, BRTs) rather than building grade separators or flyovers.
COMMENTS
This one wasn't that bad
silkboard - 31 August, 2008 - 11:54
Sandeep, the video you dug out from flickr shows a road which is a lot better than most today. Pedestrian traffic was light, Trees are on the pavement, many places where they have widened the roads, you have electric poles, and at few places even trees standing on the road surface! I didn't see even one biker on the pavement, or driving on the wrong side of the road - almost all crowded roads tend to have these examples.
All the points you made are valid. Actually, Bangalore Traffic Police's BTRAC project is doing some of this. The only thing I don't see that project doing well is measures to keep pedestrians off the road and safe on pavements. Thats a much harder job than painting roads and installing traffic signals.
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