AN ANSWER TO OUR TRAFFIC PROBLEMS

20-Sep-2015 was a special day, it was a day packed with lots of fun and so many learning's. My partner has just joined a club called HSR cyclists club and has introduced me to this club and one of their great initiatives called “OPEN STREETS”. The moment I heard about this event I was really thrilled about going for it with my 3 year old and finally it did happened on 20th-Sep, WOW it was an awesome experience and has given me many other brilliant ideas on the infinite possibilities of such events. Well that later but let me share some highlights of this event.

Highlights

No automobiles for a full Day: No automobiles vehicles were allowed in the HSR layout area and the only things which were allowed were bicycles and public transport. The HSR locality looked so different, so serene, Kids were playing on the road and even people who don’t own a bicycle were trying their hands on various kind of bicycles available. There were no traffic jams in the traffic signal deficient HSR streets and one can only imagine the small impact we had on the environment during this day. We all know HSR is a rich neighbourhood where every house owns at least 2 cars but good that very few of these came out on this day, The impact in HSR was clearly visible and then there was a multiplier effort on various surrounding neighbourhoods where folks from HSR used to go for an outing.

Full Day pack event: The event was a full day packed event consisting of at least a dozen plus activities for kids, adults and seniors. The kids didn’t wanted to go back to home they were thrilled and engrossed into pottery, tug of wars, carom, drawing, chess, painting and what not. The speciality was that all of this was happening right in the middle of the roads, right in the open streets, it was fun to see all of us sitting equally together without any differences on the same street.  

Public Departments at their Best:  Well public criticism about our traffic cops, BMTC workers and government officials is one of our favourite pass times, we never ever think about the minimum amount of resources our public servants have to manage the entire social ecosystem, we never think about the amount of efforts they need to put to manage so much with so little. The Open streets event was a fantastic example of the super management skills of our public sector workers, the traffic cops, the BMTC workers and local police. Each one of them were nonstop on the job for straight 12 hours on a Sunday, It was due to their herculean efforts this entire event went so safely, accident free and quiet well managed. If there is a good cause, strong leadership and freedom to operate our public sector workers can actually deliver outstanding results and that too with so minimal resources. Kudos to all the BMTC workers, Traffic and local police professionals who managed this event!

What Next

scale up such efforts: Well this event is a real example of innovation and passion, its efforts such as this which can actually solve our traffic chaos and not any OLA, Chola or UBER. This event actually opened up plethora of opportunities across the board, for the beginners we can replicate the same event across every locality in Bangalore and try it further across PAN INDIA. At least one weekend every month our streets should have no automobiles, be pollution free, fun filled, One day each month we should have OPEN STREETS.

No Automobiles workday: We can also extend this initiative further and try for a NO automobile workday (may be Friday of each week) at our workplaces. Bangalore is the city of IT professionals, for the starters if we can just start with all the companies in technology parks observing a NO Automobile workday and strictly enforce their employees to either use public transport or bicycles for a single day of the week, if we are able to do this we have solved 20% of our traffic problem.

Analytics based urban traffic planning: Before we start with broader initiatives such as No Automobiles Workday and every Neighborhood OPEN STREET, we need to do some serious logistical planning. This planning needs to be focused around two key areas of Urban Public Transport planning and the logistical planning for bicycle’s availability. Public Transport planning can be done based on beacon based traffic analysis and then analytics based route planning, the whole objective being to maximize customer use and increase public transport availability. Thanks to Shashi the founder of HSR Cyclists group for so truly following his passion and creating this great start up, I have taken my leap and am thrilled about becoming part of this group and will do everything possible in my capacity to improve things further, what about you?