Bangalore’s traffic planning is a slow-motion car crash
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Ejipura slum dwellers use kerosene for cooking purposes as they are too poor to afford an LPG connection.
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By Nitindra Bandyopadhyay
BANGALORE (Dec. 2)—Looking up from his morning paper, Fairoze gazes at his ailing pony with a tear in his eye.
“Bhura was hit by a car six months back, and it crippled him,” said Fairoze, owner of a horse cart stand at Kalisipalyam in centreal Bangalore.
Horse-drawn carriages, or tanga, which were for hundreds of years a cheap and fast mode of transportation in India, are fading away, but they can still be seen on the streets of big cities, including Bangalore. It is a sad sight to see the ponies hurriedly clip-clopping along noisy, traffic-choked roads with scared eyes. Their continued presence symbolizes the haphazard nature of Bangalore’s transportation planning.
“Business is running, but not like the old days,” Fairoze said with a sigh. “Nothing is left from what I earn. It’s getting more difficult day by day.”
The tanga’s glory days are long gone. Only few tanga owners are left in Bangalore, and they struggle to do enough business to feed their animals and their families. The horses’ working lives are miserable as they have to inhale poisonous exhaust fumes from the bikes, cars and trucks that long ago superseded the tanga.
“The life of the ponies on the roads of Bangalore is tough,” says Kumar, loading his tanga with aluminum frames to be delivered to a nearby construction site. He has been a tangawala for the past 15 years.
“Government officials never think about poor people,” said Shamshuddin, 40, who has been working as a tangawala for the past 20 years. “The only thing they care about is to fill their own pockets.”
Fairoze says: “Instead of a plan to serve all modes of transport, the state government came up with a court order banning animal-drawn carriages from city roads. The court order is there, but it is not followed strictly.”
City unprepared for growth after IT boom
Bangalore’s transport crisis has been aggravated by rapid growth in the context of low incomes, poor transport infrastructure, rampant suburban sprawl, sharply rising motor vehicle use and increasing fuel prices.
A wide range of motorized and nonmotorized vehicles share roadways, and land use and transport planning is inadequate and uncoordinated. All this can be attributed to the sudden IT boom in the city, according to Ashwin Mahesh, an urban research strategist at the state government’s Office of Urban Affairs.
The government has concentrated more and more on mobility-based transport solutions instead of looking at the accessibility factor. This has left the urban poor at a disadvantage.
The plight of common people not owning motorized vehicle does not end with the sad saga of the tangas. Pedestrians in Bangalore suffer the same fate as the tangawalas and their ponies.
Devi, 32, works as a home help and earn only Rs. 600 a month. Her youngest daughter clung to her mother as she spoke to a SoftCopy reporter in front of their house in the Ambedkar Nagar slum near Nayandahalli.
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Ejipura slum dwellers use kerosene for cooking purposes as they are too poor to afford an LPG connection.
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On such a small wage, it is too expensive for Devi to use buses in Bangalore because the minimum fare is Rs. 9. So she walks seven to eight kilometers every day to reach her place of work at Rajarajeshwari Nagar in Bangalore.
Devi also attends to her children and other household chores after walking along a dusty stretch of Mysore Road amid passing heavy goods vehicles—the pavement there is in such bad condition it is unusable.
“It’s scary to walk here, but I have no choice—there is no proper space for pedestrians, which increases the risk of accidents,” she says.
Clutching her youngest daughter tightly, she says: “My children are very small and totally dependent on me. If something happen to me who will look after them?”
Pedestrians’ needs neglected
Bangaloreans are increasingly forced to rely on motorized transport. Longer distances between home and place of work make walking and cycling less feasible, while increasing motor traffic makes walking and cycling less safe according to a report by the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy.
While the poor are especially disadvantaged, Bangalore’s middle class also struggles with inadequate housing and transport. The unavailability of goods and affordable housing near the city forces a rising proportion of the middle class to live in distant suburbs.
The focus of urban development has been on building roads to increase mobility. In doing so the state government has overlooked the interests of the urban poor. Even the bus service is not very affordable.
A look at the city budget of Bangalore shows the dimensions of the problem. There is proposed investment of about $12 billion over 15 years on upgrading roads. The share allocated for pedestrian projects, meanwhile, is only 0.6 percent of the total budget.
Rather than drafting plans that will make things worse, it is high time that the government took small steps now to put the city back on the right path to viable growth by focusing on the needs of every stratum of society.
If the present planning strategy is maintained we will see more lame ponies like Bhura or some Devi lying in a corner of a government hospital after being mowed down by a truck.
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