Category: infrastructure

The National College Flyover

What will happen to the controversial National College Flyover when the Metro gets built? If I remember right, the proposed Metro goes from Lalbagh West Gate up Vani Vilas road, and is supposed to take a right turn on to K R Road at the National College circle. Surely there is no space on VV Road to for the metro and the flyover to exist side by side. They can’t take the metro underground there since the ground there has to bear the additional weight of the flyover.

So what will become of the flyover? Yet another example of the BBMP’s shortsightedness.

I don’t remember the forum (it might have been this blog, or its predecessor) but I had once mentioned as to how the National College Flyover was useless. And I had gotten shouted down by a bunch of people saying “go in the evening and see the number of vehicles on the flyover, and you’ll know it’s not useless”. I’ve gone there a few evenings after that (over the last 2-3 years) and watched the traffic in the evening, and still believe that it wasn’t necessary.

It wasn’t necessary because the traffic at the intersection isn’t enough of a reduction in petrol and time cost of going over the flyover to pay for the flyover in a reasonable number of years (if I remember my minor subjects right, this is the standard reasoning by transportation engineers). People on K R Road, and the traffic going towards Jain college from “north road” (the western part of VV Road) still have to spend an insane amount of time at the signal. People on VV Road have it easy but then they get stuck at the new signal that has been installed at the junction of VV Road and Shankar Mutt Road.

And to consider the amount of controversy that the flyover created when it was built. And the fact that it’s most likely going to get pulled down for the metro construction.

Munger on urban transportation

The latest podcast on Econtalk has Duke economist Mike Munger talking about public transport, and how things have changed for the worse in Santiago after public transport was nationalized.

One of the points mentioned in the podcast talks about homogeneity in services after nationalization. Munger talks about how usage of the public transport system dropped after nationalization and people started using their cars much more. The reason, he mentions, is that earlier there were different classes of service. But the current left-of-center government decided that everyone has to travel in the same way and so the class system in buses was abolished.

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A little more on public transport

There are three factors that affect the choice of mode of transport – cost, time and convenience. You usually make the decision regarding what mode to take by evaluating how much you are willing to “spend” in terms of each of these. For example, if you live in Mumbai, taking the local train would be the most effective in terms of cost and time, but not really so in terms of convenience. Hence, you may sometimes give up time and cost and invest in a taxi so that you travel in better convenience.

This needs to be kept in mind when trying to design an efficient public transport system – the combination of cost, time and convenience needs to be attractive for the user to abandon private transport in favour of public. One mistake that is commonly made is to forget the convenience part, which leads to a large number of people to stick to their private transport. In related stuff, in my first ever post on the IEB, I had argued for segmented public transport so that people can find their own combinations within the public transport system.

This post is about the time aspect. The thing with a system based on buses is that you can do little about the time factor – unless you decide to create specific bus lanes, which aren’t too feasible currently in a place like Bangalore, you need to use the general road space. However, this is only as far as traveling time goes. What can, and should, be improved is waiting time.

Last week, while I was on my way to the M G Road area to meet sudheernarayan for the unofficial photowalk, I purchased a daily pass (for Rs. 30 you can travel on any bus from anywhere to anywhere else on that day). Though there exist direct buses from my place to MG Road, I figured out that it would be faster if I changed buses. Basic assumption was monotonicity – if bus A and bus B both go from point X to point Y, and if A reaches X before B, then A will reach Y before B. And that every time I went forward a small distance, that would increase my chances of getting a bus to the final destination.

So I take a random bus from my place to Banashankari – which improves the chances of getting a bus to MG Road by a factor of three. Then another 2 buses to fourth block – increases probability of getting bus by about 50%. By probability I mean the expected value of getting a bus to your destination in the next one second (I mean, assume Poisson distribution, etc.). I took four buses to get to M G Road but spent a total of five minutes waiting.

Now that the story is out of the way, the key to a good bus system would be to decrease waiting time. Right now, it’s quite horrible in Bangalore on a number of routes, as frequency of direct buses is low and changing is also quite difficult. And as for changing buses, there should be a system which makes interchanges easier – typically you should be able to switch buses by standing at the same bus stop.

Right now I need to go down to watch football, so I’ll write the second part of this post tomorrow. In that I’ll talk about how the network can be redesigned so as to decrease average waiting time for commuters. Of course, given the volumes and the fleet in operation today, one will need to introduce several more buses before the “convenience” bit becomes better.

Water Privatization revisited

I first wrote about water privatization on this blog back in 2006. I had written that bit as part of a term paper for an infrastructure course at IIMB, and it seemed like we didn’t do too well as far as the term paper went.

I revisited the topic sometime last year when i talked about water privatization in Kundapur. I cross posted that on the Indian Economy Blog also.

My main argument there was that privatization of water would ensure an OPTION for everyone to access clean piped drinking water, and this option value would offset the higher prices faced by those who already have the connection – who are mainly the reasonably well to do.

The latest to comment on this matter is Tyler Cowen. Writing in the Forbes, he calls for unregulated privatization of water supply in developing countries. And he mentions precisely the same reasons as I did in my earlier posts.

I hope Prof. Ranga, who didn’t give us enough credit for our term paper back then, is reading this.

Pleasant Observations

This morning, on the way to the gym, i saw a pleasant and wonderful sight. In fact, it was a curious problem but the solution gave me hope that the average intelligence in India is not too low.

It was shortly passed 7 am, and the traffic lights at South End Circle had just come on. However, the intersection itself was empty as vehicles stood on all six roads waiting for the light to turn green. After half a minute of observance, I think everyone figured out that there was a problem with the lights.

Soon traffic started flowing from the Madhavan Park side. No, there was no green light. However, the fact that it was red all around must have helped to keep the traffic from the other directions quiet. In ten seconds, all traffic from the Madhavan Park side had passed the intersection, and traffic flowed from Elephant Rock road (from the direction of Elephant Rock). Note that this was the natural order at that signal – the light turns green for the Madhavan Park side followed by the elephant rock side.

In another? twenty seconds, traffic from elephant rock had ceased, and people from both sides of RV Road began to move. Together. As it always happens when there are functioning lights or a policeman. As usual, this took longer than other directions, and then traffic flowed from the Yediyur side.

It was beautiful. It was as if there were functioning lights, or a traffic policeman in his place. It was probably self-regulation at its best. The fact that the light was red all around helped I think – people thought twice before jumping the signal. I thought it was one perfect round completed successfully as I started moving my car as soon as the Yediyur side emptied. Unfortunately, one BMTC bus on RV Road (coming from Lalbagh side) happened to jump the signal at that moment, and spoilt the few moments of bliss. Thankfully no one else followed suit, and traffic from my side passed peacefully.

I’m not sure what happened next but just the fact that Bangalore traffic, which has almost gone the Delhi way thanks to massive immigration from those parts and also the presence of Tata Sumos, could regulate itself perfectly for a minute or two was inspiring. Maybe it was a skewed sample. Yes, I don’t have enough data points. But it made me feel good.??

More on pricing of air tickets

More than a week back, I had written in my blog that the airports need to change the fee structure of user charges, etc. so as to drive the marginal cost down to zero so as to ensure more efficient usage of seat space and better revenue management. It seems like I didn’t? do my research too well. Out of the approx. Rs. 2800 in “fixed charges”, about Rs. 500 only is user charges, the rest being levied by the airlines as “fuel surcharge” (remember that airline fuel isn’t subsidized like petrol or diesel).

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Zoning with respect to the new airport

Now that the airport has been successfully moved, despite the vehement protests from the powerful IT-BT-ITES lobby and various others, the next fear is that these companies will move close to the new airport. As it stands now, I’m not sure how the NH7 and other roads that lead to the new airport are going to deal with the increased traffic. If you add to this traffic generated due to commercial space in the same direction, things can get really bad indeed.

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Marginal cost of flying

The problem with all these 1 rupee – 2 rupee offers in indian aviation is that they aren’t really that cheap. On top of this you have the various taxes and user charges which come up to some Rs. 1500 (I’m not sure of the exact number). What has effectively happened is that these charges have put a floor on the price of airline tickets in India.

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Correction

In a post I wrote a month back, I had talked about Predicatably Irrational Traffic – in which I talked about a bunch of motorists collectively jumping a signal which they deemed unfair.

Now, having read “The Logic of Life” a couple of weeks back, I’m not sure the heading of that was correct. I’m not sure if we were being irrational there in jumping the signal. I think what happened that day can be better classified as, to use the terminology developed by Gary Becker, etc., a “rational crime”.

Madras Trip – Random Thoughts

I’d gone to Madras yesterday to participate in the annual QFI open quiz. Went with the usual team – kodhi and madman (aadisht). Missed qualification for the finals by one point. The only saving grace was that we didn’t miss any obvious question, so we didn’t feel that bad for not qualifying. A few pertinent observations from the trip

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