Click to play videoNew Delhi/Mumbai/Pune/BangaloreKolkata: The BRT debate will lead to no solutions, for even if it is scrapped, Indian cities have a traffic problem to deal with. Road space is limited and traffic is very diverse traffic. Just replicating methods from other countries may not help and planners are grappling with one question – what's the best way to handle traffic – which is going to get messier and messier. Here's a nationwide picture.
As Delhi grapples with it's BRT nightmare, not many people know that the Bus Rapid Transit System as a concept was first introduced in India in Pune in December 2006. It was hailed as the answer to Pune's traffic troubles.
But one year down the lane complaints persist.
Mumbai today has 7,100 cars for every kilometre of road. Town planners say that simply making roads broader will not help.
“Over the last few years the Maharashtra Government has not done anything to improve the situation of the roads,” said architect Hafeez Contractor.
“Simply making the roads broader will not help. Underpasses need to be made. Arterial roads, especially a ring road needs to be made to avert the traffic problem.
If Mumbai creates a complete ring road round it, say, a 10-lane ring road, and has three east-west links in the city and another four in the suburbs, that would solve the problem tremendously,” he said, adding that Mumbai has fallen behind other cities like Hyderabad and Bangalore in terms of making better planned roads.
Whatever Contractor may say, the situation is not that different in Bangalore.
Once called the Garden City, and later the IT City, the Karnataka capital is now derided as the city of traffic jams. About 1,000 vehicles are added to the roads of Bangalore's every day.
“It's quite obvious the vehicles will increase so we have to increase mass transport - that is the primary thing that has to be introduced. In the absence of an effective mass transport, nothing is working,” said Karnataka government’s Traffic Advisor, Prof M N Sreehari.
Unplanned growth is a bane for Kolkata, too. The city vehicles has increased by 20 per cent in the past five years.
A city, according to experts, should have 26 per cent space for roads, but all that Kolkata has is six per cent. It's a story repeated in city after city.
India’s metros, the torchbearers of a shining India, have clearly become advertisements for unplanned and chaotic development.
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