Industries may be asked to adopt `safe roads to office'

Industries may be asked to adopt `safe roads to office'
The Hindu

Managements being persuaded to use buses to transport their employees

BANGALORE: Traffic congestion and accidents on roads leading to the industrial areas around the city are what the police are getting ready to tackle now.

With the initial opposition to the "Safe Roads to School" programme cooling down and with more schools opting for them, the police want to make it easier for people travelling to Electronics City and other areas on and around Hosur Road. The industries located on Tumkur Road and Bellary Road will receive their attention later.

The widening of Hosur Road and the completion of the Madiwala Flyover have not made things easier. Surveys show that 40,000 cars take this stretch every day, many of them bound for Electronics City and others to the Bommanahalli Industrial Area. Being part of the highway leading to Tamil Nadu and the trucking centre of the region, Namakkal, it will not be easy to curb the movement of heavy vehicles, the police have found. What they hope to do is to limit the number of personal vehicles going to industrial areas closer to Bangalore by persuading more industries to use buses to transport their staff.

The traffic police, in a presentation to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Karnataka, pointed out that the situation will become worse and the roads will get more congested within another two years. Which means, traffic snarls on both ends of the Madiwala flyover will become worsen.

"We are only persuading the industries to hire more buses... if each bus can transport about 60 people, there will be that many less cars on the road," a police officer said. This should not pose any strain on most companies that were now paying large conveyance allowances to their staff but it will entail some persuasion on the part of the managements as well, he added.

Groups of smaller industries can even pool their resources to buy or hire buses, if they were located close to each other.

Some of the managements, when contacted, said they welcomed the idea but will have to use air-conditioned buses to provide their staff the comfort they are used to. But that work to difficult time schedules, may not be able to transport all their staff on buses. Wherever there were regular shifts, buses can be a viable alternative.