Thread by @TowardsLiberti

I tried to tag and map the number of speed-breakers / road-humps inside Electronic City Phase-1 & 2 township.

I could spot 80 speed-breakers within 17.9 km, i.e., 4.5 humps/km. This analysis is to root cause the high traffic snarls in EC Phase-1.

(1/21)

Some context: Electronic City(EC) is an Industrial Township in Bengaluru, housing 158 companies including India's largest IT companies Infosys, Wipro, TCS and Tech Mahindra.

More than 1 lakh people work here.

(2/21)

EC is under Electronics City Industrial Township Area (ELCITA), not under the Bengaluru City Corporation(BBMP).

ELCITA has board members from Industries and has expert committees to manage various functions of the townships including traffic.

(3/21)

ELCITA has built quality roads, but made a fundamental mistake of installing speed-breakers everywhere, which is systemically slowing down traffic.

Let me explain why it does more bad than good.

(4/21)

There are speed-breakers installed at

Case-A: At front gates of big companies
Case-B: Before and after major junctions

Most of them are marked with Zebra lines, so I am assuming it is meant for aiding pedestrian crossing.

(5/21)

Case-A: Let's take the example of Wipro EC-4 parking lot. There are entry(13) & exit(14) gates 210 meters apart having 4 speed-breakers.

EC-4 accommodates around 1500 cars and around 4000 bikes. Assume around 6000 vehicles use these gates daily.

(6/21)

The exit gate is mostly closed except for 2 hrs in the evening. Which means it is closed for 22 hrs in a weekday.

The entry gate traffic peaks between 8-11 AM.

My guesstimate is that there will be a minimum of 50,000 vehicles plying up and down on Neeladri road daily.

(7/21)

Why should they jump four hurdles every time they pass Wipro avenue, whether it is day or night, peak or off-peak hours, working day or holiday?

Why are we punishing 90% just for 10% people's comfort?

You can find the number of piled vehicles at Gate-13 in the image👇

(8/21)

My request to @Wipro and @ELCITA_IN is to replace these with two traffic signals at both the gates.

It can be either manually controlled by security staff or a road sensor-activated signal, which turns on when a vehicle is detected.

(9/21)

Push-button based pedestrian signals help pedestrians to cross the road safely instead of ambiguous speed breakers.

As a tech-company @Wipro should take the lead instead of regressive speed-breakers which is a big menace across Karnataka and Bengaluru City.

(10/21)

In 2017, I worked with the @The_Hindu to publish an article highlighting the exact problem without mentioning @Wipro's name.

Read more:

thehindu.com/news/cities/ba…

(11/21)

Case-B: Now, there are speed-breakers at all major junctions before and after traffic signals.

From what it looks, these are meant for pedestrian crossings. But it's the main bottleneck that systemically chokes the traffic flow.

(12/21)

Even if the signal is green, the avg speed at which vehicles cross the junction is very slow because of two speed-breakers.

The effective speed at the signal is limited to 5-10 kmph instead of an ideal 40+ kmph. It is as good as digging two potholes at the junction.

(13/21)

Remember this: Different vehicles have a different rate of acceleration.

An auto-rickshaw takes 8-10 secs to reach 40 kmph while a car can do it in 3-4 secs.

Car's power is useless if it is behind an auto-rickshaw.

You are as slow as the slowest in the chain.

(14/21)

From Phase-1 toll plaza to Wipro Gate-14, there are 13 humps in a distance of 2.1 km.

Driving at 50 kmph speed limit, at midnight with zero traffic, how long does it take to cover 2.1 km?

It should have taken 150 secs, instead, it takes 360 secs (6 mins, @10:30PM)👇

(15/21)

Now in the morning peak hour traffic, it takes 12 mins for the same distance.

Nothing surprising as our best case average speed is 20 kmph, instead of 50 kmph. The sole reason being speed breakers.

Optimise your best case, it will take care of your worst-case as well.

(16/21)

On a normal working day, I jump 72 speed-breakers, when I counted one day. I think there will be a lot of people jumping more than 100.

In 2016, I did a story with Aditya Bharadwaj of @THBengaluru on speed-breakers in Outer Ring Road. Read more:

(17/21)
thehindu.com/news/cities/ba…

RWAs are the biggest proponents of speed-breakers, but what they don't realize is that emergency services including Ambulances, Fire Services gets delayed by several minutes even at midnight because of speed-breakers.

It does more bad than good for the city.

(18/21)

The biggest argument for speed-breakers is to assist pedestrians crossing roads.

It is a half-baked and ambiguous hack, as it just slows down the traffic instead of stopping for the pedestrian's safety. The right solution is to install pedestrian signals.

(19/21)

I sincerely hope @ELCITA will take this suggestion seriously.

There are other ideas for improving traffic flow using synchronous signals which can solve the traffic snarls to a great extent. More on that later.

(20/21)

I really appreciate your good work in controlling dust pollution. @ELCITA has achieved the best air quality numbers in Bangalore, by focusing on vacuuming the roads daily.

Sharing a small video recently captured at the @Infosys Air Quality monitoring station.

(21/21)