BRT fiasco

Much has been said about the murderous BRT corridors set up in Delhi, however the keen issue missed while discussing issues which have become emotional is their intrinsic logical value.

A BRT corridor takes birth from the idea that a mass transport system is useless unless it is fast. Buses are a mass transport system but on a choc-block jam packed road they are as slow as the rest of the traffic.

A buss corridor is one of the ideas that intends to speed up the whole thing by saying that out of the whole road lets dedicate lanes only for buses, this way the only thing stopping them would be red lights. In theory this is a good idea, especially if you add to it ac buses which makes it convenient for even white collar executives to avail of this instead of travelling by their own vehicle.

However the current implementation as everyone has found out stinks. Primarily because

a. It seems that there was no choke points analysis done (refer to The Goal by Mr. Goldratt) which means till they built the thing they didnt know other than red lights what would slow down the system.

b. No plan B : which means in case of something going wrong like it did they had no plan to switch to and as they realized once something goes wrong its hard to react to it at that very instant

c. No Public discussion of plan: I am not sure of this, but i believe that the design of the corridor was not discussed publicly, the Linux system of keeping the code open works the best in cases like this because it allows everyone to find out faults in the sytem and suggest improvements making the design a whole lot more robust.

d. No Communication: All plans for the public require that the public be made aware of the costs as well as the benefits of the plan. As far as Delhi knows the plan is the brainchild of some dumb politician meant to harass them, Delhiites are in no mood to suppor the plan because their buy in was never sought for it...

so there goes...the learnings from the 5 Km stretch of the BRT could and can easily be used to correct the design flaws for the whole system, but for people who are right now too busy trying to save their own skins that doesnt seem to be a high priority thing.

going ahead the BRT is not the only idea that can make the busses a good mass transport option another way to do that is to make roads bus only for particular hours in the morning and evening. Like the BRT this is easier said than done but just like BRT the option is a feasible one.

Speeding up transport can also be done by encouraging car pooling (visit sites like carpoolmumbai.com ), private ideas like these should be helped along by the government.

Another note: I believe that the metro was badly designed. Given that the design can't be altered for the lifetime of it once it has been made, the metro has too little seating space inside, for a public transport system which offers most space as standing space and travel times of upto an hour it can be quite criminal to make the user stand while travelling, and this hasn't shown its face yet, but when the Noida to Gurgaon stretch gets done this aspect would come to light. I am not sure of the technical feasibility but wider cabins with more seating in them might have worked better in the Indian context than the American style cabins where the population load is quite less.