Saturday, December 27, 2008

Bangalore roads

There seems to be a major inefficiency with Bangalore road repairs. Potholes are never fixed. But every now and then major roads get a big overhauling, but they get into bad shape very soon. I read in the newspaper once that contractors don't like to do pothole fixing ; they prefer to do the major overhauling (which seems pretty obvious, less painstaking, more expenses and more profits). But keeping contractors happy is hardly the city's first priority. And from the above it would seem the major resurfacing also is substandard.

Given the huge amount of money in road construction, it seems there are huge inefficiencies in this. I would love to see contractors reined in and forced to do a lot of pothole repairing. Certainly an area of civic engagement. I wonder if some people have already looked into this.



On a different note, the above is a bad quality video of a BMTC bus (the articulated type, which is almost double the length of the standard one) reversing on a narrow section of Indiranagar 100 feet road because a section of the road got suddenly shut off due to metro construction. Someone should be fired for the driver not being informed that the route was no longer available (alternatively the driver should be fired if he was illegally using that route which was anyway in pretty bad shape due to the construction). One of my background ideas is that some white collar jobs like bus and train driving should be paid a lot. Not only is this appropriate, because the drivers have peoples lives in their hands, but it also creates some nice churn in the traditional ideas of what occupations are cool to do and what are not. Remember how when we were kids we wanted to bus and train drivers and suchlike. It would be nice if these remained respectable career options on growing up.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

VK,
You should get http://www.seeclickfix going in bangalore.
You can create public record of non-emergency issues like potholes and also create a watch area for local officials so that they receive alerts as issues like potholes are reported.

We have seen tremendous results in cities where this new tool is being used.

After you create a watch area for yourself you can generate a widget for reporting issues for your site or you can generate rss on reported issues as well.

Unknown said...

sorry, http://www.seeclickfix.com