Bus Rapid Transport System (BRTS)

Pune is facing traffic issues and the infrastructure here isn't sufficient. To solve this issue to some extent various studies were done and after spending crores of rupees they came up with various plans. One among those was BRTS. I saw how they reserved a seperate lane for the buses. I was sceptical of its success from the day I saw the roads on which a lane was reserved. How can they make such a mistake if a common man can understand that its not going to work. Theory and practical are two different things. All things which look working on paper sometimes fail terrribly when put on practice. Some of my views...

BRTS was a good idea. But it was to fail because

1) The roads weren't wide enough to allow a seperate lane for buses. This led to increase in chaos. And marking a seperate road, involved freezing few inches of already scarce roads width. They did try to increase the width, but it wasn't sufficient. The ideal would have been to have seperate lanes for heavy vehicles, light vehicles and very light vehicles, but this is quite a impossible task as this will require freeing space near road, which looks a distant realy in near future.

2) Reserving seperate lane only for Government Buses : This was I think a terrible decision to make. Just imagine, one lane is reserved for government run buses, and on the other lane private buses, trucks, jeeps, cars, bikes.. will move. This will bring more chaos naturally. Now they have allowed private buses too, my simple query is...how can you commit such a gross error ?

3) Stress on Infrastrucure only : Wheneve we think of solving a problem, we try to bring more money. So naturally they thought of running lots of development plans. Its good that we are expanding infrastructure, but we should also ask a question : are we utilising what we have to the fullest ? We need to put to best use with what we have. Traffic today is badly managed, which needs a lot of improvement. And believe me, solving this to a large extent not always needs Flyovers, wide roads, etc . We should apply our logic when we think of solving problems.

4) Blindly following the plans : We blindly accept what big consultation firms propose. And this is the practice throughout the country. I don't think they know the exact ground conditions. Showing the action plan with figures, graphs looks promising..but we need to test those too.

5) More Stress should be on Managing people : We need to train our countrymen on driving habits. we are terrible on this. Saying that we don't have enough people to enforce this effectively. I only want to say, can you not make a zone, say of just 2km square, an ideal traffic rule zone. Enforce the law with 100% seriousness, you never know what small steps can do.

So from next time we should apply plain logic when selecting schemes. Just because it has come from a big firm, we shouldn't doubt our acumen.