Jampacked as it might sound!

A good time to welcome namma metro and start dreaming of a jam free city drives. Mostly it remains a dream in our country whatever we invent. There had been in-numerous mentions of car pooling, go green with cycling and what not in last few years. How do we really figure out what is best for us and the environment? How good is the commute and is that really the best we could do for ourselves?

It is really not surprising that we end up cursing and bad mouthing all modes of travel in few years whatever we are to invent or discover. This is partly or vastly because of the traffic we end up facing be in inside a train or on road. I don't mean the vehicles but the people. Whole of the Bangalore metro seems to be jam packed during the office hours and weekends, often making me wonder aren't we capable to add more cars to the train or is it just that we are fond of the sweat smelling commute in a jam packed train? Now if we are to add, how many more cars can we add? Can it be ever enough for our country? We even have highly qualified queuing theory experts living in Bangalore where ISI has its own office(Mysore Road).

Are we doing it in a practical manner or just being casual as usual? You might be thinking that it is easy to complain and find faults in whatever we do, but the reality is that I am complaining about the wrong problem. The real problem is not the traffic or the number of cars or the facilities. On one side we need abundant training or demonstration on how not to destroy the facilities we had been bestowed upon. Personally I have noticed many people trying to damage the train cars or the platforms in various unknown ways because our people are used to how we handle our Indian Railways owned trains. But these daily commute city runners are not the same and needs special care and attention like our dear ones. We can't ill-treat or mistreat them for long since they get moody too.

One of the reason for such a metro in our cities is to reduce the traffic and commute time but we still see that it is not really reducing the traffic but certainly the commute time for the metro goers. Did we ever wonder why our city metros are mostly build above the roads? Maybe we couldn't find better space and won't get too. The drivers in cities can never be the taught discipline unless we get blessed with hardworking non selfish enforcers which hard to find as a good old gem in a book stall. Coming to my point, the fundamental problem our country is facing in this space is not traffic or metro mishandling or infrastructure or all offices in one city are, but it is population!

Of course, it is the same population which you and I had proudly written essays in schools despising. But what are we doing for it? Can humans stop reproducing? Maybe not a good idea ;).

There are quite a lot of things that we can do as citizen of this adventurous country. Adventurous because we have no restrictions in most of the things in our country and our people are ready to face life head-on without thinking about future or future generations. Most of the things we discuss are not in our capacity to change but yes, we can surely give it a thought as thought drives humanity.

We should stop condensing the growth to certain cities or areas of the city. There are multitudes of good that can do. We should rethink whether is there any benefit in having a city itself when the villages and towns can do the job. Do we really need an office to be in city center? Allowing an unified growth across the country in moderate manner can help to better utilize our resources especially water and air, if at all it matters as more and more people buy water in present world due to scarcity. The time won't be far when we buy oxygen from government or private agencies if we live in this manner.

We should rethink and control population in a manner that people who could really provide the necessities of the child and take up the social responsibility to bring up a good citizen are allowed to do so without any restrictions.

Many articles had been written disproving the commonly claimed diesel emission issues and it might be time for government itself to introduce hydrogen fueled buses as their fleet. They should stop thinking about repair and reuse but think natural friendly hydrogen fueled buses for city transports. More than many pair of eyes had already witnessed the dreadful state of the emissions which makes those Indonesian volcano emissions feel minuscule.

The buses in cities to have marked bus stops and any other stops should be penalized from the bus operators. I often wonder how ridiculous it is to have bus stops while taking the ascend or descend on a bridge but somehow our buses seems to get it all wrong consistently creating blocks. Another interesting thing are the blocks caused by bus stops on all turnings and road intersections which looks very much "Made in India". Let's stop worrying and being jealous about commuters with no helmet or security interest, because if they don't value their life, lets not try to be the God. We should focus more on such issues created by pollution, population and nomadic stops by large vehicles. We often get to sight large trucks filling wast
e collected using smaller vehicles from them on the roads of Bangalore during office hours, maybe we should get it moved before 7 or late night so that the roads are not affected.

The potholes had taken lot of lives and injured many dear ones including a colleague as recent as last Thursday. This needs to be dealt with promptly, with our construction methods it is very easy to get that death hole created but should be of people's interest to fill it at the earliest. If we have to take it to streets to educate our own people, we must do that without any second thought. I am not doing justice to my page which says write it when you feel it, because this blog is long due. By the time of writing, I have already contacted city authorities and city police myself with results worth my blog(whatever it might mean to you :D)

We feel the pain for our country and should love to make it the best we can. Not forgetting the fact that our own Gandhi was killed by our own men, I don't expect any better treatment for us who dare to care.