The topic of this blog is how to fight the Bangalore’s traffic. The point is after being in Bangalore for close to three years, I realize this issue now as I started to experience the traffic only now. Till February this year, I had no commitments and I always chose to stay close to office, making use of all gym and cafeteria facility. Now the hard reality of traffic has struck because of my CHANGE FOR GOOD.I spend almost 3 to 3.5 hours of my day in traffic driving around 60 KMs to my work location. Most of the Bangaloreans do. As I spoke to people around, I heard most of them travelling for minimum 2 hours a day in traffic.In these two or three hours,a person can do whatever he wants to wishes to do.
One thing which makes me wonder is why do every individual need to go to the work location every day? Is the presence of each and every employee in an organization mandatory? I do understand there are some roles, which are highly critical and require the presence, but definitely not all as the number of people on the roads.
We have got connected to the remote locations of the world by technology, so why not within Bangalore. All that one needs is connectivity though a datacard or wifi and a continuous supply of power for laptops. All the newly constructed houses have that facility. And I am sure namma wifi strategy for Bangalore would help each one of us connected even more as compared to any other times. For now we can still manage with 3G Datacards.
Some of my thoughts which would help in fighting the traffic problem of Bangalore is provided below. Some are at the individual level, some at the Company level and few at the government level.
•Company & Government should define the roles where the mandatory presence is required and other should be asked to do a work from home(WFH)
•Company should make sure an individual whose presence is required is provided the housing within 2-5 kms of office location. I don’t think all members of a family would be working in ‘mandatorily presence’ role. One gets the accommodation, rest of them do a WFH.
•IT companies should make use of cabs as mandatory; the attendance to be recorded in cabs along with office premise, to ensure that 1 person does not occupy 1 car space on the road. For those who can’t use the cabs, they should give valid medical certificates and reasons for the same
•Government should give better training to traffic police in Bangalore, half of the issues are where there are traffic police and manual signals
•Government should provide HRA tax exemption only when the house is within 5 kms range of their office location. See number of people changing their house within few months.
•Government should construct foot over bridges. There are so many places where traffic issues arise only because the traffic is stopped for people to cross the road. We are not America yet that the traffic is stopped for public to walk and cross. It is required but not at the cost of commuters sitting and honking in the vehicles. To take some examples, crossing opposite esteem mall, Manyata tech park ring road crossing.
•Companies should have some incentive linked to number of KMs run by your car registered in the company on a monthly or quarterly basis. All the cars have system to measure the KMs. Lesser the KMs, more would be incentive as a CSR initiative. We are definitely going to save on energy by that.
•At an individual level, we can try and use metro and do carpooling. Not sure at the feasibility of that at this point of time in Bangalore, but it would help at the basic levels though.
•Government should build underground tunnel roads or long and high bridges for long distance travelers, but that’s not an immediate solution as well.
Let’s think and bring out of box solutions. Expanding the roads or Making traffic signals automated is not the right thing that would help to solve this as it’s not because of roads or signals but the core problem is number of vehicles on the roads are too high. That has to be brought down.
So what would be the cons?
Side effect of work from home may be argued upon that people may not be able to socialize. But we can bring solution to that by having one day of the week working where all employees have to come mandatory. Saves the gossip time and the would use the same for professional interactions.
The radio channels may suffer as number of people listening may go down. I keep listening to radio and they say ‘call me or WhatsApp me if you are stuck in traffic’. At times it helps as we realize that it not just us, buy many like us who are in the same boat suffering from the traffic problem, but I am sure Radio channels are innovative enough to get more listeners.
Let’s do something to bring a ‘Change for Good’ for Namma Bengaluru, as every CHANGE is for GOOD!
