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Lacking Traffic Discipline in Bangalore

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Written By rvas - 13 July, 2007

Traffic Bangalore BTRAC

Bangalore means Traffic - Wherever we see, we see jams, accidents, fights between drivers and much more unpredictable incidents. What is preventing Bangalore from having a clean, disciplined traffic. Few of the issues I found the difference between foreign countries and India in General and Bangalore in Particular are:

1. People are not afraid of Law and the Traffic Cops.

2. Fines in India is very cheap and often all the traffic police can be bribed to getaway from the fine. Even if the fines are increased, since the cops can be bribed, people can getaway from accidents and traffic violations.

3. Lack of lane discipline and uniform speed - We can see people, even an educated IT guy also not following any lane discipline. People manoveur their vehicles all over the road in a zig zag manner and with many S cuttings and sometimes with unpredictable 'U' turns, especially autos.

4. Overloaded trucks moving slowly and blocking the traffic.

5. Trucks and other vehicles stopping on the road side.

6. Traffic police not being effective - We can see traffic police simply sitting in some circle on a bike or on the side of the road without taking any action on the offenders - Instead traffic police should be patroling the road and catch hold of offenders and put huge fine irrespective of he being minister or his son or any cadre.

7. During accidents, the opposite party should simply take the Insurance Number and get it reimbursed from the insurance - Only problem in India is these Insurance companies cheat a lot during claims - This has to be regulated strictly by Government. During accidents, lot of local people make a big scene and try to make profit out of it.

8. We also need long running flyovers with local traffic not intersecting with it with Entry and Exit systems atleast on major roads like ring road. What Karnataka Government is doing is, it is just constructing small flyovers to just cross the signals, but, as soon as we cross the signal, again we are trapped. If we have long running flyovers like that of City Market (Sirsi Circle) flyover, it can ease the flow of traffic. Government of Karnataka did a good thing in that and didn't followed the same thing in other places.

Do we need B-TRAC or any other sophisticated system when we don't have our basics right. If we are on track with the basic discipline, then the advancements in technology may solve our problem. Since we are not at all on track with the basics of traffic, B-TRAC or 'N' number of small flyovers and underpasses will not solve our problem.

Please add on to this thread. Although these discussions are just for our mental comfortness and nothing will come to reality in India.

 

COMMENTS

Implementation is the key

shas3n - 16 July, 2007 - 05:13

We have all the rules and regulations in place but its the implementation thats lacking. I agree that hidden cameras et al can be used to track and penalise violaters.

I wrote a pice earlier on how this can be done with no cost to Government here. Do you think it would work?

This insurance thing is very

tsubba - 13 July, 2007 - 10:48

This insurance thing is very interesting. can you elaborate on this? how about pedestrians and cyclists? do all vehicles have insurance? how about vehicles from different states? So you are saying implement a no-fault system. no takrar. no on road discussion. note down each others numbers, get a police report, go to insurance company. settle it off the road. Time & again these points are coming up, random driving behaviors, lack of discipline, lack of enforcement. I have observed that even in the best trained/disciplined/enforced systems when the traffic density is high, basically chaos creeps in. there are different people driving in different states of mind. and there is no way to control that. plus in big cities people are strangers and are in a hurry to go where they are going... always, even if it is to a movie. So I guess as long as you have individuals driving you cannot escape this. But,as you say, it is important to get some basic things right: honest, test based, unbribed testing for licensing & honest, un bribed enforcement of traffic laws. Finally, some aspects of BTRAC are actually very important as Bangalore's traffic grows. like data collection, traffic monitoring etc. for example, with these they can make more informed and smarter decisions about where to make infrastructure interventions and how to make it. if you have solid data then the chances are your design will be better.

Insurance during accidents

rvas - 14 July, 2007 - 06:26

Yes, in US, during accidents, people settle the damages through insurance company. If there is an accident, people take the insurance number of the other party and settle it offsite. Also, immediately cops settle down things. There will be no 'scene' on the Road. Yes, traffic monitoring is very much important - but we do not have the basic things right. Police has to enforce these things first. With BTRAC and hidden cameras, cops should send tickets to the offenders by watching them through monitoring centres with fines for late payments. This should be implemented immediately as a Proof of concept in some roads like MG Road. More emphasis should be given to lane discipline, otherwise only 1 car can pass where space exists for 2 cars. As you said, even in big cities in US like New York, problem exists, but people use public transport extensively and walk in CBDs. Also parking charges are expensive in big cities and charged hourly.

what about the traffic management itself?

- 18 July, 2007 - 04:22

well all your points are valid, but last but not the least, point number 9. should be our pathetic traffic management system! - Our traffic rules are decades old and not at all explained properly. - No one understands the traffic rules properly, not even the cops, else how can Lane discipline - do not overtake from left coexist? - Lanes are not even marked properly. - on many major roads, the width of the road keeps varying from 1 lane to 3 lanes and back within a span of 200m. how to explain this? - any junction where 4 roads meet, they put a traffic light with some blind logic as 40 seconds for each road. that makes it atleast 160 seconds wait and 10 such signals in your route, guess what more than 30min just wait at the signal? - cut the junctions, even on ring road, at places there is a junction every 100m. This will just not be solved by constructing flyovers every 100m! There is more to this, but in Bangalore there are quite a few organizations who have their engineers working 24x7 to maintain traffic for some London, Ney York, Seattle, but to manage our own city's traffic no one is used! Pity... Chaitanya

center median?

tsubba - 24 April, 2008 - 11:47

what do you mean by center median? like a circle?

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