Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Morning musings...

8 30 AM on a busy weekday.Was walking down the Airport Road (in Bangalore), with my roomie,to catch the 5 45 shuttle.15 more minutes to go. Come on lets, walk fast, I say to her.Lets catch an auto,but man there is bumper to bumper traffic that seems to move every 20minutes. Not worth it.

We walk for 5 minutes. Suddenly you hear the siren of an ambulance. It is stuck in the traffic with not an inch to move. Surely it must have been a life threatening situation for someone inside the ambulance and i can very well imagine the plight of the family.The multi-speciality hospital was just 5 minutes away but with the current traffic situation the ambulance could not have moved for another 15 minutes. We keep moving on...

I have heard people losing life because they can't afford the treatment or maybe due to unavailability of doctors,equipments etc but if it is because they were caught in traffic... then we have to seriously think about it.

Airport road is one of the most important road that houses the bigwigs of the software industry,five star hotels and is also home to the pride of India, ISRO. But unfortunately its very poorly planned.There is no concept of lanes. I can only say that the main road itself is a lane.

The software companies have time to time raised concerns about the poor infrastructure in the city.Promises are made but the situation doesn't seem to improve much. One reason can be the city's developing at a rate that is difficult to grasp. But it is not gone completely out of control.

It is late to salvage the situation but one solution can be to analyse traffic/road management in other major cities and implement the same in Bangalore also. But it takes a lot of patience from the city people who have to be resourceful dynamic with a vision to make it come true.

3 comments:

SushMira said...

hey very true and important ..but one thing is that we can't do anything to this..only spread it by blogging so somebody who can do can do get an oppurtunity to think :-)..I will link ur post in mine too..

Vijay said...

Very true and i have seen it many a times. No use pointing fingers at the cops also. They cant hear the siren 2 KM ahead. But a relay between the cops will help. He can voice thru his walkie talkie that a ambulance is rushing so keep that side of the road traffic moving. this is the best he can do. once ambulance crosses him he has to onform the next cop in the road. No idea about copless signals.

Sujatha said...

Hats off to you, Amitha. Wonderful way of projecting your views. Yes really felt bad for the life that needed immediate attention of the doctors. I also agree with Vijay. Also what I feel is we can have arrangements foe not blocking the signal. In Germany, if such a similar situation (w.r.t ambulance) prevails, they have an excellent arrangement of displaying the signal so that all the vehicles / pedestrians stop and make way for the ambulance every eight to ten KMs. Once the ambulance crosses a certain distance the vehicles start plying over their normal route. Its so very pleasing to see such things. Life is so important for them. For us??? It is very much important, but, what steps have been taken???