Bangalore - a dying city

We are now closing in on an year of moving to Bangalore and I have reached the conclusion that this is no longer a city for an average IT person like me. What meaning does life have when you find you dont have time to do the things you love to do, you find that even the time with your loved ones is running short - and its not the work thats the problem. I would be happy if it were so. It is the horrible traffic jams which drain you of energy and any remaining freshness at the end of a long day at work. I start from office at around 6.30 and the 6-odd kms to my home at Pai Layout takes a little more than an hour every day. Driving a car during the time is as stressful as it can get. The bottleneck at the Benniganahalli flyover has remained for over three years now and not an iota of work appears to have done to alleviate this problem. There are two solutions I can think of:


a) widening the road - this is too much to expect. So lets not talk about this.


b) have traffic signals and control the traffic - is this too much to ask or what ???? Rather than a traffic controller blocking one side for 5 mins, cant we have a regulated flow every minute? The pile up would reduce, hence speeding up the traffic.


Of course, the problem is also that the K.R.Puram cable bridge and the K.R.Puram station under it forms another huge bottleneck. The brainless design of the cable bridge is the major reason for this. I cant fathom why they couldnt connect the flyover to the ORR. During peak time, the cable bridge is relatively empty while the junction at the K.R.Puram station leading to the ORR is jammed. If the bridge-ORR link had been made, most traffic would have gone on the bridge thus freeing up the road below.


Lack of traffic signals, poor traffic planning and indisciplined driving are prime causes of the predicament that Bangalore is in. My deadline is Jan 2009. If things dont improve by then, I am clear that I would be bidding farewell to Bangalore and move to a city whre there is sufficient time for a personal life.


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