It is good that Aditya Thackeray, Maharashtra’s young environment minister, found time during his visit for the recent Glasgow climate summit to study the working of London Transport organization. He noticed that London operates 9000 buses, 75 per cent of them double deckers. He made the point during a conference on infrastructure yesterday. He did no talk about the[Read More...]
Many parts of the world observed today, September 22, as the international car-free day, a day for freedom and safety for pedestrians. The United Nations has supported priority for pedestrians. But the Indian government is busy encouraging cars, it has just announced a productivity linked incentive (PLI) scheme to subsidise the industry to the tune of thousands of crores of[Read More...]
I was very sad to hear of the death this morning of Dinesh Mohan, noted expert on road safety, in St Stephen’s hospital in Delhi. It is a big loss to the international campaign for road safety, he was a consultant to many countries and currently the U.N. is observing a road safety week. He did pioneering research on road[Read More...]
Due to the Covid lockdown in 2020, though the number of road traffic accidents declined yet deaths did not decline in the same proportion because people drive at higher speeds which continued to result in fatal accidents. Every year, more than 1.3 million people die in road traffic crashes – that’s one person every 24 seconds. Excessive speed is[Read More...]
It would be good if our politicians and bureaucrats did a little introspection like Bangalore’s traffic police commissioner Ravikanthe Gowda. He said he had not travelled by a bus for the last twenty years and we make decisions about public transport without using public transport ourselves and without involving people who are real users. This situation has to change, he[Read More...]
Here is an opportunity to stress the demand for democratisation of road space. The government dare not accuse the activists of being urban Naxals because its own guidelines in the wake of Covid suggest creating more space on roads for bicycles and pedestrians. Various studies conducted by the ministry of housing and urban affairs MoHUA show that about 16-57% of[Read More...]
After walking on Bangalore’s or Benguluru’s fashionable M.G. road earlier this week I casually hopped into a bus at Anil Kumble circle named after the former Indian cricket captain. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the fare was only Rs. 5 for Shivaji Nagar bus station. A distance of a little less than a km. but still the[Read More...]
