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Written By silkboard - 18 July, 2008

Traffic Bangalore Pune research Analysis MoUD entropy public transport

Executive Summary of a Wilbur Smith study on Traffic & Transportation Policies and Strategies in Urban Areas in India is now available on the website of Ministry of Urban Development. The 20 page summary document makes a good reading.

Praja members would love the language, especially the terms like "slow moving vehicle index", "on-street parking interference index". Essentially, they have quantified stuff like "entropy", "edge friction", "turbulence" and "viscosity" that we often borrow and use here at Praja from thermo and fluid dynamics. Some equations for example:

  • Parking Interference Index = 1/ (w1 x % of major road length used for on-street parking + w2 x onstreet parking demand on major roads. Fair enough, though I worry if its should be road length or road width or road area used for on-street parking. How to measure on-street parking demand too is tricky. that itself is a function of availability of public transport.
  • Slow Moving Vehicle Index = [(W1 x Availability of cycle tracks)+ (w2 x SMV share in trips)]. Fair enough again, only one point though. They have added cycles and slow moving vehicles (SMV) here, I would add a weight for pedestrians as well. That would be a function of availability of pedestrian walkway width available along major roads. They already have a walkability index
  • Walkability Index: is calculated as [(W1 x Availability of footpath)+ (w2 x Pedestrian Facility rating)]. Okay.

There is a mother of all "Congestion Index" as well which is defined as: Mobility Index = 1- (A/M), where:

  • A - Average journey speed observed on major corridors of the city during peak hours and
  • M - Desirable Average journey speed on major road networks of a city during peak hour, which is assumed as 30 KMPH.

That's it - 30 kmph?? I do Whitefield to J P Nagar (25 km) in 60 minutes even today. Looks like I should be happy with that :)

There also is a "City Bus supply index", defined as City Bus Fleet per 1 lakh population. Refer our discussions here on how Bangalore has good number of buses, yet low bus usage, arguably because of poorly done routing. Shouldn't routing plan or spread supply a weight to this city Bus Supply Index. No surprises that Bangalore (39) is third after Delhi (43), Madurai (42) in public transport availability), where as Mumbai (16) comes much below. I am not criticizing this index, only trying to understand the purpose of it. Perhaps it is to show that City Bus count itself has no correlation to quality or usage of public transport.

There is some other nice stuff in there. Like:

  • The equation for Trip length takes "shape factor" into account. Shape factor is ration of minimum spread to maximum spread. Mumbai would be low, and Bangalore high on this factor.
  • The equation for Public Transport percentage Slum population as a proxy variable to account for low income households. So true. If a city has 20% population in low income bracket, and public transport usage is 20%, that could tell you that income is only factor driving the usage, and quality offered may not be good.

Anyway, read and digest what is available to us (executive summary), and let us discuss this in context of what we have been discussing here for past few months. Recommended reading for all traffic geeks.

COMMENTS

thanks...

tsubba - 18 July, 2008 - 12:51

alrighty. thanks.

my understanding

tsubba - 18 July, 2008 - 17:20

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.

too geeky but important

silkboard - 18 July, 2008 - 14:48

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.

not geeky

tsubba - 18 July, 2008 - 14:58

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.

The test link...

idontspam - 18 July, 2008 - 17:19

Found it...

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

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