Commute

K K Nagar cycle track, the first dedicated space for non-motorised transport (NMT) users in Chennai was laid three years ago. Today, the track is just a pothole-filled road with several encroachments. The 17.5-km stretch from Sardar Patel Road to Island Ground is a demarcated cycle lane. But the lane gets narrower as one progresses and is even missing at a few places, leaving cyclists with no choice but to disembark and walk their cycles. Greater Chennai Traffic Police has also set up a temporary pop-up cycling lane at Kamarajar Salai, meant to be operational for two hours every morning.…

Long before it was called the commuter rail or the suburban rail, it was known as the circular rail. When it was first talked about in the 1980s, it sounded like simplicity itself: Bengaluru has railway tracks on three sides -- East, North and West. Build tracks on the Southern side and voila, we will have a circular railway that goes all around the city. Well, that was the plan. Let alone its name, even the concept of a circular railway was forgotten. Years later, when several mass transit options were considered to meet the growing city's transport needs, the…

Almost a year ago, on January 30 2020, air conditioning was introduced on some routes of the Central Railway network. This was meant to be an additional cog in Mumbai's public transport wheel. A year later, that experiment has all but failed. On January 16, only 3 ticketed passengers and 200 monthly season ticket (MST) passengers were on the ten AC trains operational between CST and Kalyan stations. Result: revenue earned was just Rs 7610 till 5 pm.  Earlier, in the period from December 17 (when AC locals re-started after lockdown) and January 15, the Central Railways registered a remarkable losses…

Mass Rapid Transport Systems the world over have transformed the lives of people and the landscape of cities. That’s exactly the magic Namma Metro has weaved, at least for some Bengalurueans. The Metro -- where ever it is operational -- has been a dream-come-true. It has provided respite from traffic snarls, accidents, pollution, wastage of time and money, and liberated us from our "adjust maadkoli" attitude towards these everyday hassles. Read more: Is Bengaluru’s Metro Phase 2 almost ready? Here’s a progress report Namma Metro services towards Yelachenahalli from Nada Prabhu Kempegowda Station in June 2017 came as a boon…

In a few of the English movies I have seen, I recall seeing London Black Cabs, in which a firm partition isolates the driver from the passengers, with a small window for communication. Even in the days of Sherlock Holmes and horse-drawn Hansom Cabs, we see that the passengers are separated from the driver - some sort of social distancing. So, the idea of social distancing in small public transport vehicles is not really new. A Hansom Cab with driver on the sets of a Sherlock Holmes film (Photo: By Andrew Dunn - English Wikipedia) In June, when the city…

Once the Dahisar toll naaka starts using FASTag from January 1, the city would go completely cashless in toll collection. Although, there is still some distance to go before Mumbai becomes fully high-tech. Since electronic toll collection infrastructure is yet to be set up, the toll collection personnel will scan FASTags with handheld scanners.  Four other toll points - Airoli, Vashi, LBS Marg and Eastern Express Highway- had the option to pay both through cash and FASTag. Dahisar was the entry point, where only cash was being collected.   FASTag, a Radio-frequency identification technology-enabled electronic toll fee collection (ETC) system, has…

All through the lockdown imposed to avert the spread of COVID-19, Chennai was without public transport and even now, services have just begun to operate in a limited manner. While there have been signs of a cycling revival, there are also reports of an increase in the sales of personal motor vehicles. But, as colleges and offices begin to reopen, it raises various questions about what commute in the city will be like in the coming year. Even before the pandemic, and in fact, for several years now, there has been a call to rethink how transportation works in Chennai.…

Sometime in March this year the whole country went into a severe lockdown due to COVID-19. Life and the resultant travel came to a standstill for over a month. Most of our understanding of how travel in Mumbai has been since then, is largely empirical. Some key data points that we’ve seen published since the pandemic began are - bicycle sales have more than doubled since the lockdown began; automobile sales picked up after May; and as of early November, BEST daily ridership was back up to about 23 lakhs (almost 2018 levels).  For most of us, initial days of…

“The number of women that appear in the public realm, during the day and and especially at night, is an indicator of the health of a society and the safety and livability of a city” -- Smart Cities Dive Bengaluru roads are unsafe, but they are even more so for women cyclists who have the double disadvantage of gender and their chosen mode of transportation. The number of women cyclists in the city are far fewer than men.  Women cyclists I spoke to complained about dug-up roads and inadequate safe parking spaces for cycles. “I’m always paranoid that someone would break…

The Bengaluru Bus Prayanikara Vedike has appealed to the government to constitute a joint legislative committee or a tripartite  committee of workers, transport corporations and state government to look into the issues facing road transport corporations in the State. The committee, in a press release issued Sunday, said that the government should take workers' demands and their welfare, with a  view of strengthening RTCs, into view. It should improve the accessibility and availability of the public service  for the benefit of common people.  The BBPV's appeal came in the wake of the state's road transport corporation employees -- including drivers,…