Bharat Rakshak

Redevelopment can be done simultaneously alongside building newer parts of the town that are less congested. What you need is political will, vision and lots of money.

on recent dilli trip, I spent a couple hours wandering around chandni chowk area upto fatehpuri masjid.

the only three buildings that looked in good repair were ironically among the oldest - a jain temple, a hindu temple and gurudwara sisganj!

of the rest 90% were too dangerous and old to be used per any reasonable standard you might think of - structural, fire, water, sanitation.... there are 1000s of these buildings in the area most are atleast 100 yrs old...some are 150+, the ones fronting the main road are probably better than the ones in the narrow lanes where hardly two people can pass each other. two of the oldest bank branches in india are here.

I suppose periodically a building catches fire or collapses, but people will not move out or allow redevelopment at any cost. and politically its a very powerful area with lots of votes and lots of business money + ROP concentration in one part....hence the total hands off policy.

and so the chariot flies on through the night...wheels wobbling and horses foaming but still on the rutted road...

I frankly have no peeves in designing a work campus or educational campus or even a town/ city that is free of cars. No objection at all. A good model is designing newer developing towns with mass transport systems, comfortable and efficient. Every township that is developing, that is going to grow from 100k to 300k in say 5-8 years, must plan for an MRT system and a template for that sort of standardized. It cannot remain an adhoc effort with planners sitting around a table at some late stage of development having completely opposing ideas of urban development. It has to be done at a very early stage. Cities like Chandigarh have some semblance to normalcy because this was planned. While Delhi in the age of hardly few motor cars, had great roads and gardens, the small villages were allowed to grow to million plus populations without any guidance. Then after generations were frustrated a miserly program for MRT, some connecting roads was transplanted with massive errors in calculation. It was too late in the day..That is congestion that will restrict growth and create misery.

Many of us come from an age we read Chandababa/ Ananda Bazaar Patrika type magazines/ n comics..the latter becoming more unacceptable in modern India..after all cartoons cause great ire in many parts of the world..but point is we see that gheto'ization was sort of absent pre-Islamic and Imperial era's in India. Open spaces was norm. Rishi's used to live in simple Vatikas in the midst of a forest clearing.

Harbans,

This should make you happy...er.

http://articles.economictimes.indiatime ... il-project

Theo a lot of development post industrial era is undesirable. But as long as alternatives don't emerge, we do need to catch up at the minimum. I myself shifted to Gurgaon more than 20 years ago to avoid living in congested, traffic choked neighborhoods of Delhi. Today Gurgaon itself has become like that. I know today in master plans they are giving space to wider roads, even reputed builder projects are giving 60-70% green spaces and allotting essential parking space to residents. Almost all new Office complexes, malls seem to have adequate parking space to cater to the foot falls.

We cannot get back to a pre-industrial and agrarian way today. I don't want the 16 lane highways if there was an option out. But today it is needed. It should have been planned a decade or two ago looking at the fact that Gurgaons master plan was chalked out at that time. For ages now, MG ROad, NH8 flyovers, Metro constructions have made life difficult for residents here. When this 16 lane construction comes about residents can expect another few years of chaotic condition in those areas..Thus last 20 years people have only seen construction activity and the chaos which goes with it. That is a long time. Why a generation has lived through that chaos.

I always asked why did they underestimate the demand..and why go piecemeal increasing the pain due to chaos. The answer does not lie in lack of funding options, it lies in planning. A mindset that didn't want to break up with an pre industrial-agrarian stype of thinking. They just could not imagine that the loads would be up so much. We all could see it here clearly, but people sitting on the planning tables just couldn't. Maybe they lost themselves in some files 9-5 every day.

Ideally i would think it is possible to create mini townships that would have Office, entertainment, residential, shopping districts within cycling distances and simple public feeder systems linking parts of it within it. Each mini townships could be linked up to similar others with both a MRT and adequate road networks. Such integrated networks ideally should have all public roads with landscaping and pedestrian and bicycle pathways integrated. Singapore is actually a good example. That sort of planning would indeed reduce road traffic considerably.

But achieving that is not easy if one allows pockets where 200k people live in a 500 sq meter area. Planning has to move before such congested ghetto's develop. Small villages in the North have populations of 100k plus and growing. MRT systems have to be so internalized that we should be able to put a 20 km line up in less than 6 months time. Processes and technologies for that imbibed. The best time to do it as fast is at a pre emptive stage. Thats where the planning folks mess it up. Once the town is already congested it is almost impossible to build up and create a MRT in less time without creating chaos for years on end.

This process is impeded if planners still rumble about cars being status symbols or we don't need a 'Western' style of development and we need our own model. Sure then show us an alternative. That is missing. The pressure on decision making that that group exerts is enough to damp all voices for pre emptive progress. Generations suffer due to that prevalent and entrenched mindsets.

Urban development is not just about metro cities, it is also about small towns and even villages. Pre emptive planning to reduce congestive chaos is needed. We don't have many choices..atleast not in places that are already congested like Gurgaon. We do have options in more remote and less developed areas to develop better models like in SIngapore or a bicycle friendly, low carbon footprint kind of township.

Harbans,

They very well know what the demand is. Data is one thing planning in India is flooded with. The problem is we go tell politician that we need to build 20 lane highway to upgrade from old 2-lane and acquire 2000 acres of land and his eyes glaze over. The farmers simply won't sell. And in any case the Rs 150 Billion necessary is not available.

Let me tell you a story. Way back when, Velachery in Chennai was 10 kms out of town. Planning approached the city to purchase the entire land for about Rs 80 crore, some thing like 8,000 Acres. The entire urban planning budget that year was about Rs6.5 crore. This was MGR administration and politician came and told us that there was no way the city would grow that far and told us to drop all our plans. The city is now 20 kms beyond. Just last year Chennai increased to ~ 450 sqkm in area. The running theory is reducing population density will solve the traffic problem. The aim is still to funnel all traffic trough our roads.

The problem with India is this. Density.

For Urban design axiality movement systems there is no preference for any particular mode of travel. For the past few decades planners have completely ignored how people get from A to B, and how a city is organized and how people live in cities. Planning is all about abstract theories enforced on a 2D sheet of paper. It is essentially a room and corridor system.

Again the problem in India is... ..Density.

For wide corridors, 80% passenger car travel, sub-urban type living, population density will have to be brought down to 500 persons per sqkm or less. Most parts of Massaland are down in the 250 persons per sqkm range. Unfortunately, even Gurgaon is now in the 15,000 persons per sqkm range. Interior Delhi can exceed 40,000 per sqkm. Even with just 5% of traffic in passenger cars you can see the super dense crush loads. One can imagine what it will be like if even 50% start to drive cars. Even the 16 lane highway is incapable. It can take a maximum of 2000x16 = 32,000 vehicles per hour. Assuming 1.5 persons per car this would be 48,000 per hour. I submit to you that even this will be grossly inadequate.

Lets do some math. Delhi has a population of about 12 million and is heading for 25 million in 20 years. Say we can populate them at 2,000 per sqkm, this would mean we need 12 million /2,000 = 6,000 sqkm. Actual land area of Delhi is ~1,400 sqkm. So already it is 8,000 person per sqkm. In 20 years it will be 16,000 persons per sqkm, entire state of Delhi. To keep it at 2,000/sqkm we would need an area of ~15,000 to 20,000 sqkm. This is 1/2 the state of Haryana.

In places like Singapore 60% to 80% ++ of all passenger trips happen by public transport. To make this happen Singapore taxes private cars extortionately and has a fixed quota of cars allowed. That is why those streets are nice and open. Else they too would have grid lock. Also keep in mind Singapore does not do Agriculture or Animal husbandry.

Paris core which has a population density of 20,000-30,000 per sqkm funnels 70%+ of its population through its metro transit systems. It does this by banning car parking. No area to park hence no cars. Every super dense city has had to take draconian action against cars. Most of Rome bans cars. Naples has a car police that hauls them away.

The difference in India is ALL our towns are like this. In fact our entire country is like this congested ghetto. We are merely ignoring the inevitable so far.

major infrastructure needs to be a "federal" responsibility

You bet.

And infrastructure development should be turned into a strategic weapon.

Build a massive new town Union Territory in, say, the most undeveloped reaches of Nagaland. Plan for it to hold 10-12 million souls from all over India. Make it an urban paradise in an area which has never seen development. Wide roads. Big plot sizes for homes. Uninterrupted power supply. Flat skyline.

Attract, with superb infrastructure, companies from all over India. TCS, Infosys, WNS, Wipro. Good power availability, and installing an IIT, along with lots of tech training institutes (ITI's etc) could attract heavy engineering and manufacturing also.

Make a central park type urban forest of a thousand acres in the center of the city.

Throw in a thousand acres for a cantonment that holds a new Himalayan strike corps, and air bases.

Imagine the change it would bring to the region. In a flash, the naga insurgency would be finished.

The problem is that development in India is only anti-X, without going wholeheartedly in the opposite direction either. The result is that we get neither the benefits of X, nor of its opposite.

We don't want to plan for cars, because cars are inefficient. But we will not build adequate bus and train lines, refuse to modernize taxi fleets, and let autorickshaws charge outrageous amounts. So we get neither the benefits of good roads like the US, nor good public transport like East Asian cities (and to be honest, every half-decent city in the world has both good roads and good public transport).

We don't like China flooding the Indian market with cheap goods, but we won't allow our own manufacturing sector to develop. So most manufactured products in India cost as much as or more than in the US, because we can't make them cheaply here, and we slap customs duties on them when they come in from abroad.

Opportunity costs are everywhere. While we dither and do nothing for decades, we lose time that isn't coming back.

If planners want to not build for cars, they should equally quickly move in the direction of building good public transport. But that isn't happening either.

Theo Ji, i have been saying this for quite some time here now. We don't allow any more Paharganj's, Mahipalpurs, Bahadurgarhs to develop. Anytime a congested place developing with more than a 100k population in a ghetto size of half a sq km..we need to be on red alert.

You on the other hand have gone on record blaming a dozen vehicles on a single street that on either side is populated like the Paharganj's or Mahipalpurs. By blaming it on vehicles, you perpetuate the problem. Not eliminate it in any way. By saying that cars are a status symbol, you show clearly that your ideals have no congruence with the aspirations and problems of people at large. These are your ideas. Your claims and posts. Why blame me for pointing it out? Why don't you just go to google and check mahipalpur or bahdurgarh or any myriad villages.

There is pain indeed in bulldozing ghetto's for inroads. And i never recommended it. You posted a pic as if i recommended it. I did not. I recommended not allowing such ghetto's to develop in the first place. Hamlet'izing developing ghetto's that we call villages at an initial stage itself. It simply is not happening as long as we consider congestion is due to cars/ status symbols whatever you like to call them..or plans being made to develop cities with just 8-10% roads ear marked. You are in that case not asking for development..you are asking people to be condemned.

there are 2 problems here

1) Suraj pointed out before. Our city politicians are insignificant .. So our cities don't have TFTA infra .intra city politics is often trivial. My neighbor in A'bad is a corporator. He had wide TFTA concrete toads built in our locality ..His rival in the neighboring constituency was not allowed to do the same..Fundings were blocked. The rivals H&D was hurt and he alleged corruption on the corporator at my place. The charges were not entirely false. But the committee decided that those roads must be demolished ... Why on earth would anyone order demolition of perfectly built roads of TFTA quality even when corruption is proven ? Thankfully they made peace and the roads were not demolished. Even the rival got the budget to build roads for the constituency .. Narendra Modi arrived in Guj an year after this incident. And the pace of modernization is breath taking since then...

this is the Sabarmati riverfront now..It you look at photographs on the same site 5 years ago , you would find it slum infested with people washing clothes...This shows that proper efforts can yield results...

View of Sabarmati Riverfront, Ahmedabad


2) People in India often resign to there fate.. Why do corporators build bad roads ? Because if they breakdown early they can make money giving repair contracts... If solid tfta roads are built , than they ll not need much maintenance .. And people take this atyachar lying down..

Lets imagine a hypothetical scenario ... Imagine a time in future when..Entire Indian population is urbanized ...the population density of the urban centers matches those of the American cities ..(imagine cities being as spread out as those in amreeka ,with as many wide empty spaces) .. How much land areas would it occupy ? about 15-20% of India would house all its population ,even if Indian cities become as spread out as those of the US. Now we don't want cities as spread out as those in the US. European levels of density are perfectly acceptable to me.

Even though paris has greater population density than say , allahabad or patna,yet patna feels more crowded than paris ,because it is haphazard.. netherlands has greater population density than India . But no city from netherlands figures in the 50 densest cities of the world. the list is filled with Indian cities...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ci ... on_density

the high urban density in India is mainly due to absent planning...

Just wondering what the ramifications of Bangalore expanding eastward will be. It will eventually spill over into TN territory. Has there even been such a precedent?

Delhi spilling into Gurgaon, Noida, etc. The border state will just establish its own satellite city next door.

Harbans,

I have no agenda at all. All I care about is what works. And don't think I'm defending planning in India. It is completely dysfunctional, one reason I only consult from outside now. As people have pointed out cars don't work everywhere. Under no circumstance can we abandon places like Pharganj. Yes we can plan new cities better with more space for traffic. And we are doing this but the gridlock continues because places like Pharganj are not being upgraded. The prohibitive cost of land however is telling us something about what we are doing. By the way I don't consider Paharganj a ghetto at all. I have been to Ghettos and Paharganj is not one. It is poor urban neighborhood but all I see is potential not a Ghetto.

The market is telling us land is a super duper premium component in India. And yes I know regulations distort this signal but even small towns are flashing the same signal. We will have to minimize our use of it. This is a market signal, ignore at your peril.

So far I have avoided technical discussion. Let me bring up a simple one. When a planner allocates say 40% of passenger traffic to cars there are certain things that must be done. Let me point out 2 in a highly simplified striped down version. Say we allocate a level of service of E, the absolute lowest without complete fail. Massaland is typically LOS C/D or better. At E clearance requirements around a car is ~1M with a buffer of 2.5m in city traffic. Volume to capacity V/C permitted is 22% meaning 78% of road is buffer, open, turn lanes, etc to prevent grid lock even though 78% is technically classified as grid lock. Pedestrian space requirement is roughly 6 sqft per person.

So lets do a quick calculation on how much traffic space we need for a 10 sqkm area of Paharganj or about 10x250 = 2500 acres. Assume density of 25,000 per sqkm, though Paharganj is actually 40,000 and higher. So I will assume half the population has already been dispatched elsewhere.

So total population in that area is 250,000. Since 40% must possess cars, say 100,000 cars in that area. So just for parking say a small compact car we need, 2+1mx2.5+1m = 10.5 sqm. Per car. For 100,000 cars we need 10.5x100,000 ~ 1 million sqm. ~ 1,000,000/4,000 = 250 acres. So 10% of land must be set aside for car parking or traffic will gridlock. Now keep in mind that typically you ned 2 to 2.5 times per car as you need to be able to drive somewhere to park the car and then drive back to park the car. But I'll ignore that. And multilevel car parks don't help because they displace habitation making densities even higher.

Let take two - traffic space needed for LOS E with V/C of 22/78. so 10.5x78/22= 37 sqm. So 37x100,000 = 3.7million sqm. So far we are up to 10%+37% = 47%. Or 47% of space in Paharganj will have to be demolished to accommodate cars for just 40% of the folks.

So lets take pedestrian needs, since people walk too. So 0.5x250,000 = 125,000 sqm. So a total of 40 acres! If we increase LOS to say pedestrian B we get 2.5x250,000=325,000 sqm. Or roughly 100, acres. About 4% of the land for LOS B, with parks, benches, streams, trees, fountains, etc.

With LOS B Public transport system. Typically 100,000 PPHPD, 2 metro lines on the diagonal could make sure everyone was within a km of a station. Cost is roughly 10 kmx2.5 Billion=Rs25 Billion. This would require 0 area if underground or say 1% if above.

This I think is doable.

You may not have said it but by calling Paharganj a ghetto and calling for demolition and car traffic that is the impact of your statement. You should not hide from it, nothing to be ashamed of as it is an arm of urban up gradation. Many many people advocate it. Undoubtedly some areas are beyond redemption and demolition will be required. Most buildings will in any case have to be demolished and rebuilt over 20-30 years.

Finally let me take up the picture. Those 20 cars occupy 10.5x20= 210 sqm of space. In a dense market like that with typically 3-4 persons per sqm that means 210x3 = 630 persons. Because of those 20 cars 630 persons were displaced. I would call that fat cat behavior, No.

The border state will just establish its own satellite city next door.

-> blr is nearly merged with Hosur now, which is the satellite city in south. hosur is the GHQ of ashok leyland.
-> sarjapur road has some ways to got before hitting TN border
-> old madras road -> the proposed expway will facilitate this merger when it happens. for now the NH is being 4 laned I hear.

the sabarmati riverfront does not look like anywhere in india - looks like something in dubai or israel. how did he manage to get the slums moved? were they resettled somewhere? how far from the original place since I gather the dharavi type plans run into problems when the people having jobs in nearby high income areas do not want to move 50km away.

Indeed.. large portions of Ahmedabad and Surat look very TFTA ... Other cities are massively improving too.. 7000 slum dwelling families were provided flats under either JNURM or state schemes.. They readily vacated their slums..




There was some talk of public transport...you can look at how Modi managed it in Guj..The middle lane is for the BRTS buses only...the system is present through most of Ahmedabad.. A metro rail construction is about to begin...








Surat and ahmedabad flyovers are TFTA quality...

Guj is in safe hands...

I thought I would take this from the other direction.

Say we want a LOS of D, really should NOT be less than this, and compute the density permissible. Assume 40% of people are in car at peak times per LOS. Take the same 10 sqkm area. V/C ratio is now down to 16. or 16/84. Say we allocate 40% of land to car traffic & pedestrian access, so roughly 400,000 sqm ~ 1000 acres.

10.5(X)+(10.5*84/16)*0.4(X)+1.5(X)= 400,000
34.85X=400,000. (Meaning you need roughly 25-35 linear meters of road parking & highway per car. BTW the actual LOS V/C is 50 linear meters but I'll ignore that)

X=11,477 ~ 12,000 cars. Yes really. This is what planning tells us. You can see why a politician would take a look and laugh. BTW in USA densities are usually less than 250 per sqkm in car traffic areas. Say 3 persons per car, In USA it is 1.2 persons per car. Total is 36,000.

So we demolish a 10 sqkm chunk Paharganj and allow 36,000 people back in, so essentially 12-15 persons per acre. Delhi with roughly 300,000 acres can have a maximum population of ~ 3-4 million.

So lets project out to the country. If 80% live in Cities. We need to plan for 1 Billion. Though note it should really be 1.5 Billion as our population is projected to hit 1.8 Billion by 2050.

So we need 1500 million/15 = 100 Million acres. In a country that has ~ 600 Million acres this means 1/4 of land goes to Urban area. Since about 1/3 of our land is lakes, rivers, mountain, forest, desert, etc. really it should be about 25%-30% of our usable area.

Of course we could go the other way and build up high rise and wide roads but note the formula only cares about cars in an area. So it is independent of traffic engineering. Others have tried this high rise design with predictable consequence of permanent grid lock.
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Let take it another direction since 36,000 people occupy 2,500 acres. If an acre of land in Delhi costs say Rs 5 Crore (Anyone clarify?), Each person in Delhi needs to have 5/15 or ~ Rs 35 lakh just to pay for the land they are going to use, another signal from the market that we are being horribly inefficient & unrealistic.

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When you have less than 1/2 acre of land per person we will have to be hyper efficient with land usage.

G,

Those pictures of Guj warm my heart. That is exactly what I'm talking about. Good design with density not endless car parks. It is good that BRTS systems are being put in right from the beginning. That way majority of traffic can be kept off cars. Delhi has trouble retrofitting BRTS.

Do you know what is being done for old Ahmedabad areas like the Gandhi road area?

>>Do you know what is being done for old Ahmedabad areas like the Gandhi road area?


likely to become car free .. congested older city regions like asarwa /maskati market region are difficult to change.. From what my dad tells me , older city regions in ahmedabad and baroda are becoming restricted for cars.. If you park anywhere , havaldars will lock the tires...And you pay 100 INR fine to get them unlocked..so people prefer going to these regions by rickshaw...i ll make a point to visit these places this December ..


>>Good design with density not endless car parks.

true...A friend of mine is from Stanford madarssa.. he is involved in coding for some oiropean cities traffic management software... On my visit to california the guy introduced me to a european town planner.. urban planning has always interested him..so we had a nice conversation ..For densely populated places like Europe , Japan and India having most transport by cars is unsustainable ... he was particularly impressed by Indian rickshaws for short distance transport ...If he were to design an Indian city there would be a separate lane for rickshaws and 2 wheelers ...A mass rapid transport system like a metro rail would be the cornerstone of urban transport ...Rickshaws would be for short distance transport...they form a menace presently because of their slow speed. they tend to obstruct cars ...but if they are given separate lanes that problem will be solved... If these changes are properly implemented , the requirement of cars would reduce drastically which would cause roads to de congest..

A US style urbanization is not going to work in India as you have 1.6-1.8 billion people (2050) in one-third the area. We should look at a model of high rise construction coupled with good public transportation systems so that private vehicles are used only occasionally or when needed.

I somehow feel that a separate lane for autos can have a problem of their own. These vehicles are stop and go and tend to do it anytime any place, they just stop when they see a potential customer. that could lock the lane out if the lane is bifurcated from the other parts of the road by medians. If there are no physical barriers to the other lanes then the auto folks wont respect the lanes and move on to the other lanes freely to overtake.

it ll be more like 1.4-1.5 billion.. The population figures in 2011 census were actually below expectations...In fact below the lowest expectations...Indian population may peak lot earlier than previously expected...

Only 2% of the American land area is occupied by people ...even if we have american style urbanization ,only 20% of the Indian land area will be occupied ..even after having 1/3rd the area and 4 times the population...but we don't need american style urbanization...it has its own problems...no one wants to travel 20 miles to buy kids diapers..

If we have european level urban density (most of europe is fairly densely populated) than 10% of Indian land area can house 1.5 billion Indians ...(average urban population density of 4500/sq km , 1/3rd of present new york , 1/8th of present Mumbai) ...

At current rate of deceleration it is likely to cross 1.6 billion unless the rate of deceleration itself increases. Besides IMO US style urbanization is energy usage-wise inefficient.

Revisiting the 74th Constitutional Amendment for Better Metropolitan Governance

I feel some of the Metros need a fourth tier of governance, but we are still stuck in an incomplete mandate for 73/74.

Revisiting the 74th Constitutional Amendment for Better Metropolitan Governance

I feel some of the Metros need a fourth tier of governance, but we are still stuck in an incomplete mandate for 73/74.