Braffic

Bangalore, admired as the Garden City and heaved up as the Indian Silicon Valley by the outsiders, has a reason to bow down when it comes to the road infrastructure. But no one is to blame here because Bangalore was not built to hold these many people, nor the lakhs and lakhs of vehicles getting registered every month. Most of the roads are narrow or at least look narrow even during normal hours of traffic. This is not an attempt to blame the development authorities or the politicians; why are the roads narrow, why are those narrow roads bad, why are even those narrow roads missing in some of the most densely populated residential areas - all these are not I want to talk about here. I guess the solution to that lies on people starting to realize that the country is their home and we are not going to yap about any self-realization in this billet. One obvious panorama that strikes your mind as you travel through Bangalore roads is the despairing fashion the traffic signals operate.

I will just start with a few examples. The first one is the Koramangala Sony World junction. When the signal is green for vehicles moving in the directions shown by complete green lines, there is no green for the left moving vehicles shown in dashed green and there is no free left. The next one is the Airport Road Manipal Hospital junction. The signalling system here follows the traditional clockwise green. But you will immediately recognize by just standing there for a few minutes that there are only a very few vehicles trying to take a right to Manipal Hospital. So, the straight moving vehicles going towards Domlur have to wait for long, when the queue almost reaches the previous junction. The same case on the other way, the right-going traffic towards Jeevan Bhima Nagar is really meagre. After all, this is against the basic principles of any traffic solving algorithm that fifty percent of vehicles on a road go straight.

The next one, the Trinity junction on M G Road is a classic example of freedom being ripped off. The left-moving vehicles towards M G Road cannot move even when they see green because the straight-moving vehicles block them. (The opposite road taking to Ulsoor lake is now become a one-way). The fourth one on the Airport Road-Wind Tunnel Road junction is a slight goosy implementation. When green starts for straight-moving vehicles towards Marathahalli, it is still red for those trying to move right to Wind Tunnel Road. So, vehicles waiting behind the right-going traffic wanting to go straight keep honking without any use for the next sixty seconds. Instead of stop-allow for the right-going traffic, it should be an allow-stop approach.

You move five kilometres in the city, you will find ten signals and you will get stopped at all of them. There are a few pairs of signals which are only a few yards apart, even those, you end up seeing red when you reach both. This really infuriates you, the exasperation can even make you jump signals! I guess that's a basic criterion to be met with any automated traffic control, if not all (which is next to impossible), at least a few continuous green signals as you move straight should be synchronized. There are really a lot of pairs of signals where from one junction, you see a green on the other, but by the time you reach there, it's red and you need to switch off your engine for the next two minutes.

One-ways, fly-overs, no auto-rickshaws, no heavy-vehicles are definite solutions to traffic congestion, but there is something that we can do with existing linguistics, you just need to apply your mind on it and off you go! If the above said scenarios throughout Bangalore are solved, I reckon at least thirty percent of the traffic problems will be cleared. Our city is different, our people are different, our traffic pattern is different, then why do we have to use the all-old ecumenical ways of traditional traffic-signalling methods? Instead of the existing four-step signalling (give green for all directions on one road, move to the next in clockwise direction and complete the circle), why not make it twelve-way as depicted in the picture above (only the first six are shown), at least in those junctions where it makes relevance? Wherever possible, if we could also just 'curve' the roads leading to free-left, that would be a huge advantage, twenty five percent of the vehicles are expected to get cleared up this way.

I am no expert in traffic regulation, but these observations I make from my experience gained through working on Fuzzy Logic Solution to Traffic Control during my college days. From junctions where only three-directions of traffic are allowed at one time, this can transfer them to six at one time, just double the efficiency, you can save half of your travelling time! This is no new idea and the authorities should already be knowing about these flaws in the current model. The authorities can come up with a remodelling in the angles that we discussed and take it phase-wise through the roads of Bangalore, this will be both quicker and effective.