Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Broader roads : Only makes it worse

I went out today after a long time on a weekday and the state of the traffic on the roads did not really make it a pleasure to drive on. Anyway it got me thinking about an interview I read the other day in the newspaper and the interview was with someone from the transport department of London and he said that the experience that they have had with highly populated areas is that the more roads they built the more they got filled up and there came a point where they could not build any more roads and it has now reached a point where they have a congestion tax to go into highly populated areas like Central London in your own vehicle.

Which made me wonder - "Why can't we learn from other cities?". When we had traffic jams we built flyovers, we then broadened the roads (not consistently many a time - some places are broad and some are not thus turning the not so broad areas into bottlenecks) and all of this eased the traffic flow a great deal temporarily. But what happened is that the traffic increased and now we are back at square one. The traffic jams are back.

The only solution is to have a good efficient public transport that will ensure that we can remove the congestion from some of the areas of our city. The metro may be an expensive proposition. Why aren't we looking at other means of public transport such as making bus corridors. I don't know the answers to this problem but if we do not put serious thought to this we are bound to commit the same mistakes that the other cities have committed and we would have learnt nothing from them which is totally unpardonable.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Sudeep DSouza,

REally liked your functional testing pages.

I'm going to try them and see how well they work for me.

Thanks
AP

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