Traffic travails of a traumatized traveler

So where were you when India won the T 20 WC. The answer of the average Bangalorean would be – In a traffic jam.

Its impossible that you stay in Bangalore, you commute to office, you blog and you haven’t yet written about the JAM. So here goes.

I firmly believe that civilization will tend to come to a full circle in whatever it does. The early man started off wearing nothing but a smile. Now, if you do a regression analysis of the sartorial tastes of a typical Bollywood starlet over the last few years, you may find that few years down the line, there idea of a dress would be a few threads poised tantalisingly. And I get this feeling that if the Cro Magnon was asked to walk from Bannerughatta Road to E-city he would have taken approximately the same time as it takes now with all the Volvos and Pulsars.

The typical day of a commuter starts off with a JUMP off the bed. The jump when he sees the time is 7 when he actually expected it to be 6.30 (to be fair to Father Time, it was exactly that half an hour back). 7 means that he will be ready only for the 7.30 bus which would reach BTM at around 7.45 where a humongous mass of commuters (who presumably did there own variety of the JUMP at 7) would greet him with horns, screams and a few expletives (Nothing scatters traffic better than a well chosen, well directed, well rendered insult).

Once at BTM, the bus will cannon into action for the CRAWL. It is called the “great BTM crawl”. And as it crawls you will see the man on his bicycle whizz past and the old man with the walking stick vroom past you as your bus adjusts itself to the pace of the bus in front (which would be around .05 metres per hour). The cause of the Jam can be many. It may be because 8 buses 10 feet wide standing side by side try to squeeze past a 30 feet wide opening on the road. The maths does not work out. So you have an overdose of it. You will have 20 such rows lined behind the original mess. Add a sprinkling of cars, a dash of 2 wheelers and lo and behold you have the perfect JAM.

Another reason can be the breakdown of a vehicle. If it’s a heavy vehicle , it will mean that all other vehicles will have to skirt around it, effectively narrowing the road uptil that point. No one would want to go right behind that vehicle and then do the turnaround jig.

So what we will have in the end is lots of time to kill inside the bus. And lots of frustration to take out when out of it.

Unfortunately BTM is not the only place you have it. Hosur Road also has a toned down version of the same especially near Bomanahalli junction. And that happens ironically because they are building a flyover there to reduce the traffic jam. “But what about the BTM mess” is the question that will be uppermost in the habitual irritant’s mind. Well, the BTM mess will remain until someone decides to build a flyover there which will then prepone the traffic to Bannerughatta road and jayanagar. Until a bright fellow decides to build a flyover there and so on. So Bangalore will one day become one big flyover with roads on ground, in air, in the gutters till it chokes.

I hope I get my onsite trip before that.

What could be the solution like? In the long term may be the solution would be not how to accommodate the increasing traffic but how to reduce the existing one. A small step albeit unintentionally has been taken by having the airport outside the city at Devanahalli. That should set the mess in Airport Road right by some amount. Another step is developing the areas around Bangalore so that these multinationals find another place to breed. Or for the companies to enforce commuting through company buses a little more strictly. Its quite irritating to sit in a bus and find one entire car having only a single occupant drive past you.

It’s a part of the city’s growing up and I guess Bangalore is equipped to handle it better than others.