Controlling Bangalore traffic: mix of policy and infrastructure for stable and sustainable growth

Abstract

Economic liberalization, initiated in India in 1991, to promote marketoriented economy and expanding the role of private and foreign investments has brought tremendous impact on sudden growth of cities. The purchasing power of individuals has gone up. The major cities having sophisticated infrastructures attracted the investments. The demand for both skilled and unskilled labors increased multifold. People started migrating to cities. The congestion started very predominantly due to lack of vision in planning by local municipalities. They failed to forecast the growth and channelize the infrastructure projects required to support growths. Central government also did not give much importance to growth of parallel infrastructure, in metropolitan cities. Most of the city problems were left unattended. Now it has resulted in big disaster of serious congestion in cities. Citizens are missing all the basic amenities. Growth has become a disguised curse to people living in cities and Bangalore is one such xample. Population in Bangalore grew from 5.6 million in 2001 to around 10 million in 2015. A number of slums have cropped up around the city as a result of unmet spur in housing requirements. In spite of having the total road length ofmore than 5000 km inside the city, residents of Bangalore are the victims of peak hour traffic jams. Exponentially grown traffic in Bangalore with average minimum delay of 30 minutes per vehicle (as per Directorate of Urban Land Transport s study on mobility index 2011) in peak hour has become serious problem of inferior infrastructure.Apparently though traffic looks like the only problem, there are many related issues, the residents of Bangalore are suffering with. Air pollution, noise pollution, mental stress and higher fuel consumption are complementary to traffic problem. Because of pollution and mental stress the average health condition of the residents is deteriorating drastically.Though many infrastructure projects like Metro Rail, flyovers, under-pass etc., are proposed off late, the execution and completion will take some time. Another problem is the planning fallacy. The most of the new road expansions are planned to carry the present load of traffic or marginally high. But as there are no measures to control the growing traffic, by the time the projects are completed, the roads would again be insufficient to cater the future load. However as the infra projects are going to take long time for completion, there should be some via media mechanism to control and manage the traffic, to possible extent if not to complete extent. The via media solution to be successful, it should be cost effective, less time consuming and easily implementable.