Run Circles Around A Square City

Run Circles Around A Square City
Outlook

There’s a new plan every fortnight to improve the city’s chaotic traffic infrastructure. But the latest one, developing a 26-km core inner ring road (CIRR) skirting the city’s central business district, seems to have caught the imagination of the administration. The proposal came up at a review meeting of the Traffic Task Force set up by CM Dharam Singh and is likely to be approved. This road would be treated as a fast-track project and would be built within two years. The inspiration, apparently, comes from London and Singapore.

The promise of the four-lane CIRR—to be built by the City Corporation—is a hassle-free ride from one corner of the city to another. The controversial part is about imposing an entry fee for private vehicles that would want to enter the central business district. This is to encourage people to use public transport and avoid congesting the already crowded roads in the area. "A small fee will have to be imposed on single/double passengers who enter congested areas like Commercial Street, Brigade Road or Avenue Road. We are getting traffic scientists to study the whole idea before we implement it. This model is already prevalent in cities like London and Singapore and people pay through their debit cards," says K.V.R. Tagore, additional commissioner (Traffic). Bangalore’s roads are equipped to handle only 7 lakh vehicles, but there are already 24 lakh. Seventy-five per cent of these are private vehicles.

Bangalore already has an outer ring road and there is a plan for another peripheral ring road, beyond the outer one. Now, there’s the cirr. Still, the question uppermost on the minds of Bangaloreans is: how effective can the government’s plans on curbing traffic be when they are doing little on the public transport front? The Metro Rail project has run into major roadblocks. There’s also the anxiety that with so many ring roads, and possibly a Metro, the whole city would become a "transit point" of sorts.