Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Urban Transport in Bangalore - The Worsening Crisis


Efficient and reliable transportation systems are crucial for a city to sustain high growth rates. All services and manufacturing industries require people movers to bring and take workers and connect production facilities to the logistics chain. Unfortunately, growth, a direct result of improved economic conditions, brings with it several negatives along with its many benefits, and Bangalore is perhaps one of the prime candidate cities to demonstrate the adverse effects of growth. Very high levels of traffic congestion, pollution and safety hazards experienced in the 1970s and ‘80s in Kolkata have demonstrated the dangers of un-restructured public sector combined with un-regulated private providers for public transport services.
Priority lanes for buses on streets can reduce passenger cars & private modes of travel to a great extent. Limiting or stifling growth is neither avoidable nor necessary and to facilitate some degree of orderly city development, the Bangalore Development Authority, or BDA, the nodal planning agency had in late 2007, prepared a Comprehensive Development Plan, titled CDP-2015 that covers an extremely large area, almost the whole of Bangalore district. This extremely large coverage of land areas in the latest CDP is the result of an earlier such attempt by BDA when the previous CDP had to be drastically revised as the population anticipated for 1991 had been reached ten years earlier, by 1981 itself. It is relevant here to emphasize that the CDP/s are mostly zoning documents and do little to address congestion, particularly street congestion levels within the city as they have no bearing on transport matters nor do they provide recommendations for transport development in the newly added areas or the existing city areas. Thus, the city has not formalized a comprehensive urban transport strategy linked to an urban development strategy.


photo by rAmmoRRison


more about India:

Urban Transport Sector in Developing Countries

Urbanization, Urban India and Metropolitan Cities in India

TOWARDS A SUSTAINABLE URBAN TRANSPORT SYSTEM: PLANNING FOR NON-MOTORIZED VEHICLES IN CITIES

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