City: Bengaluru

Nov 30 deadline for Kannada signboards The BBMP has extended the deadline for commercial establishments to ensure that 60 percent of their signage is in Kannada. Establishments now have till November 30th to comply with the rule. If they don't comply, their trade licences will be cancelled or not renewed. The previous deadline was November 1, Karnataka Rajyotsava Day. Businesses were asked to have signages with 60 percent lettering in Kannada while the remaining 40 percent could be in any other language. So far, more than 8500 establishments have complied with the rule, says Vijayendra, Chief Health Officer, BBMP. After…

Bangalore Apartments' Federation (BAF), a federation representing over one lakh flats and three lakh apartment residents across Bengaluru, will launch MADHURA – 'Medical Aid for Domestic Help Under Residential Apartments'. As part of MADHURA, BAF will launch a group insurance scheme for all domestic workers. The scheme will cover maids, cooks, drivers, plumbers, electricians etc who work in apartment complexes but are not formally employed. Underscoring the importance of MADHURA, H A Nagaraja Rao, President of BAF, said, “Most domestic workers do not get coverage under government schemes like Ayushman Bharat or Arogya Karnataka as they may be above the…

Last Friday, Bengaluru City Police Commissioner Bhaskar Rao issued a notification barring private vehicles on the bus priority lane (BPL) in Outer Ring Road. The BPL - between Silk Board to KR Puram and then towards Baiyappanahalli - will benefit around a lakh Bengalureans commuting in over 800 buses everyday, says the BMTC. Authorities presume that the BPL will increase the speed and efficiency of BMTC buses, encouraging more people to use buses, and thereby will reduce traffic in the ORR. But there's been a major concern since the inception of the project - how can Bengaluru's unruly motorists be…

The adage, ‘Catch them young,’ is associated with imbibing children with values. This dictum holds good when it comes to educating school children on road safety and making them change agents for safety and influencing the larger citizenry. A step in this direction was taken through the establishment of the first School Safety Zone at St. Joseph’s School (CBSE), Bengaluru.  The School Safety Zone is a result of 3Ms’ initiative Young Change Agents for Road Safety (YCARS) in partnership with Concern for Road and Pedestrian Safety (CoRPS) and United Way of Bengaluru. The initiative was launched on 19th November in…

Even as Karnataka leads the country in renewable energy production and Bengaluru has many successful solar installations, the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company Ltd (BESCOM) is unlikely to meet its target of generating 1200 MW electricity from rooftop solar panels by 2022. BESCOM has achieved only 140 MW from solar rooftop so far, because it isn't getting enough applications from Bengalureans currently. The good news Bengaluru is definitely the Number 1 hotspot for solar installations. This year, the Kempegowda International Airport inaugurated its 3.35 MW rooftop solar power plant. "The airport has increased the consumption of solar power to over 50…

Traffic police notifies bus priority lane in ORR On Friday, the City Police Commissioner issued a notification prohibiting entry of other vehicles on the bus priority lane in ORR from Central Silk Board to Tin Factory and then towards Baiyyappanahalli. Only BMTC buses can use the lane, the notification said. Offenders will be booked under Section 177 of Motor Vehicles Act, 1988. They'll have to pay a fine of Rs 500 for the first offence and Rs 1000 for every subsequent one, said B R Ravikante Gowda, Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic). The police also plans to write to the…

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I looked at the strategic issues and practical issues respectively, in implementing the bus priority lane (BPL) project in Outer Ring Road. In this concluding part of the series, I discuss solutions to these problems: Ban slow-moving vehicles in ORR If a slow-moving vehicle is allowed on the general lanes of ORR, the entire traffic will slow down painfully. Hence BBMP must ban the entry of all slow-moving vehicles in the corridor. This includes hand-pushed carts, pedal-rickshaws and animal-driven vehicles. Do not allow BPL to cross the path of private vehicles…

Bengaluru's bus priority lane (BPL) project was to be launched in Outer Ring Road (ORR) today, but has been postponed yet again. In the first part of this series, I explored issues with respect to the overall strategy of the project. What's also clear is that the BBMP and BMTC have not thought through many practical difficulties in implementing it. Here are some of those: BPL is actually Bus 'BMTC Priority Lane'! Presently the BPL is only for BMTC, and not for other forms of mass transport such as: State transport buses from all states Private intercity (long-distance) buses  Private buses…

Tomorrow, BMTC’s bus priority lane (BPL) will be fully operational on a 27-km stretch of Outer Ring Road (ORR), from Swami Vivekananda Road to Silk Board. The project was to be launched on November 1st, but was postponed to 15th, as BBMP was unable to complete the infrastructure work due to rains. There is much optimism about the project, but it has strategic and planning issues that should have been addressed beforehand. In the first part of this series, I look at the strategic problems around BPL. BPL is not contextualised in terms of the city’s transport needs The project…

Public transport in Bengaluru has deteriorated rapidly. Though the government declares magic bullet schemes such as elevated corridors and bus priority lanes, these pop out of thin air without any city-wide planning for transportation. Rather than jumping to ad-hoc solutions, we should first be clear about the problem. At the core of this is how we measure the performance of our transportation. If any public transport agency wants to win over the public as its customers, it will have to consider the following Key Success Factors (KSFs) for mobility, and find optimum solutions. End-to-end connectivity Pickup within 300 m of…