Bangalore. Fed up of the very few wide roads, the Bangalore Traffic Department recently converted all roads into one lane roads. The reason for this move was a result of a detailed research which showed that people using wide roads were less prone to traffic jams and were only 2 hours late to office on an average.
This decision is also being seen as Bangalore’s desperate attempt to restore its legacy, which includes having extremely narrow one way roads. This is an important reflection of Bangalore’s identity, as no route should be direct enough to be memorized at once.
People wandering on Bangalore road, without knowing where they are going.
Following the Bangalore development model, this crucial decision was not expected to impact many, as Bangalore hardly had any roads that could be narrowed, but a techie who left his home for office sometime in May managed to find the correct way to office only in mid-June.
The victim of this change, the techie who had somehow managed to memorize bus routes and roads, was lost as all sign posts now pointed in different directions. In fact, the techie had to “work from road” for almost 2 weeks, often charging his laptop through traffic lights and using wi-fi offered by restaurants.
When asked about why he did not take an auto directly to his office, the techie told Faking News, “I tried taking auto 13 times. Every auto driver promised to drop me till my office, charging just 3 times the meter fare, but after 15 minutes they would drop me again at the same traffic signal telling me that my office is just 2 minutes from here.”
In fact, the techie even managed to see his office building from some distance while traveling in a BMTC bus, but since the conductor had not given him his Rs. 3 change and had written behind his ticket instead, he had to wait till the next bus stop to get down. There just wasn’t any way to go back.
Things became worse when after nearly a week, he realized that the way to go back home was even more complicated and would need him to travel in 4 BMTC buses, walk for 3 kilometers, and then take an auto.
He almost managed to reach back home, but this time the auto driver dropped him at his office instead of his home. The frustrated techie had already spent enough time coding on the streets and just did not want to acknowledge what the auto driver had managed. He took another auto and disappeared into the narrow lanes of Bangalore.
Despite such hardships, the authorities are not ready to review the runes. In fact, BDA is considering creating a new rule, according to which constructing one lane roads would become mandatory and anyone flouting this rule would be forced to become a traffic cop on a busy intersection for a year, or handed life imprisonment.
“We want to make Bangalore a city with world class roads. Roads should be so narrow that even a cycle can not overtake another cycle,” a BDA spokesperson explained the rationale. In an earlier attempt to make the city even more pedestrian friendly, footpaths were officially declared two-vehicle lanes.
With the increasing focus on road safety, it will be interesting to see how the BDA, Bangalore Traffic Police, and BBMP come up with new strategies to make the life of citizens more convenient and peaceful.
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