Pollution-free answer to traffic woes?

MONORAIL PROJECT
Pollution-free answer to traffic woes?

Times of India

Bangalore: Imagine. To reach office at ITPL, one will have to leave one’s residence at say, Vijaynagar, just 15 minutes beforehand. Minus the exasperating traffic pile-ups and hours of waiting — to traverse just 5 km.

A group of engineers and technologists, under the aegis of Metrail Consortium and Frazer Nash, on Thursday proposed a hybrid monorail system to the Karnataka government. Costing approximately Rs 40 crore a km, the monorail is virtually non-polluting. Explains Rehan Khan, director, Metrail India, “Land requirements for this are minimal — just part of pavements and areas for bus depots. This is complementary to the Metro Rail, which can’t go into every nook and corner of the city.”

Much like a flyover where traffic movement is above ground level, monorail attempts to ease traffic by having single or dual tracks. A single carriage or multiple carriages can transport 120-1,200 persons in a single trip. Besides, Khan says obstruction to regular vehicular movement will be less invasive because “it takes 18 months for the entire structure to come up and construction activities are done mostly in the night’’.

Pre-cast concrete pillars are readied off-site and erected onto the foundation. These pillars then reach glass enclosures which act as trainstops. The team has already put together route maps in two phases:

Phase I

• Jaraganahalli to Cant.onment station (18 km, 20 stations)
• Hudson Circle to Electronic City (17.7 km, 18 stations); Hudson Circle to ITPL (19 km, 17 stations)

Phase II

• Silk Board to Jaraganahalli (6.5 km, 5 stations)
• ITPL to Byappanahalli (9.5 km, 6 stations)
• North loop, Cant-Hebbal-Lingarajpuram-Shivajinagar (916.1 km, 16 stations)
• Link to Mysore Road bus-stand and metro station (3 km, 2 stations)

If approved, Bangalore could be the only city boasting of a monorail as a mass transit system a la Seattle, Kuala Lumpur or Wuppertal, Germany. Gordon Dixon, director, regional operations of Frazer Nash, technical consultants for the project, says: “Monorails are a dependable mass transit technology starting way back in 1901 when the first monorail in Wuppertal, Germany, started operations. It will use Bangalore’s abundant solar energy, and make movement pollution-free. And it has had zero fatalities in 100 years.’’