Part 2: Open for People

I have recently had some evolving thoughts on cities, transport, the environment, etc. This is the second part. I don't necessarily promise a third part. Click here for Part 1.

I arrived in Bengaluru around October 2021 after spending 3 years in Europe, mostly Rome, Italy. It was a chaotic time in most people's life, going back and forth between lockdowns and mask mandates and vaccine doses. It was particularly chaotic for those living in and around Malleswaram as Sampige road, a major, arterial road, was being "white-topped". I have written, whined, cursed and complained about this white-topping exercise multiple times in this blog before, but let me repeat what exactly it consists of. 

As far as I understand, "white-topping" is the media coinage for replacing tar roads with concrete roads. It also involves remaking the footpaths with concrete blocks, shifting all wiring, water and other pipes and cables underground in a metallic casing where it can easily be opened and repaired. This would avoid the need to dig the road for future maintenance work. The local Malleswaram MLA claimed that this was all work that was pending for several decades and that these few months of work would ensure that no roads would have to be dug or blocked for the next 100 years in the city. There could be some truth in this and overall, there was a certain streamlining of several parallel systems - no more electric poles for wires, no gaping holes in the footpath straight into the drainage. 

While this was work was ongoing however, there was complete and absolute chaos all along the streets of interior Malleswaram. Cars and scooters now thronged and choked these narrow streets, with long pile-ups reaching usually quiet and sedate residential streets. Every day a new road would be blocked and some other alternate route was suggested with little forethought or idea about the flow of traffic, with no prior warning. The streets were a nightmare to walk on. The holes and pits dug everywhere made them extremely dangerous and the construction dust was everywhere. Add on top of this constant rains throughout 2022 (the highest recorded by Bengaluru) and the incessant honking of vehicles. 

It was in the midst of this chaos that I found myself at the flower market right on Sampige road, buying flowers for an upcoming festival. As I was navigating through the sludge and construction debris and avoiding falling into the deep pits dug nearby, I actually noticed something - it was still somehow quite peaceful. The weather was nice. Sampige road is lined with large, shady trees that keep the surface reasonably cool even on the hottest days. Mostly importantly, there weren't any vehicles passing. No constant honking, no roar of loud engines, no smoke, no fear of being crushed to death under the wheels of a car with one small misstep. 

Under usual circumstances (for example, right now), the flower market takes up the entire footpath while there's a bus stop nearby. Heavy traffic whizzes by your shoulder as you are forced to walk right on the street. There are cars parked at random simply on the side of the street which completely puts the flow of traffic out of gear. This leads to more block-ups, more honking and more vehicles willing to speedily snake in and out of lanes between other vehicles, putting pedestrians at even more risk. 

I had a random thought - what if Sampige road just remained closed for traffic at all times. I am cognisant of the fact that Sampige road is an important link between the central areas of the city (Market, Majestic, MG Road) and the north - north-west of the city (Yashvantpura, Peenya, Jalahalli). Let's ignore that for the moment. 

Even with the traffic and terrible footpaths and vehicles parked everywhere and vendors occupying large parts of the footpath, Sampige road is thronged by pedestrians. It's a major shopping centre and becomes extremely crowded during festivals. Navigating 8th cross Malleswaram, a famous shopping street, is also fraught with danger under normal circumstances. This narrow street has a large volume of traffic and is filled with pedestrians. Why not let the pedestrians walk and breathe in peace? 

In the section of Sampige road where there was no active work going on but was still closed, the shop-keepers had brought their wares right on to the streets. The people were bustling on the street, buying, bargaining. Parents were more relaxed about which direction their kids were running. One misstep might cause a child to trip and fall on hard concrete, but at least he/she wouldn't be hit by a 1000 kilogram box of steel. 

"You don't close the street to traffic, you open the street to people". 

I have stayed in Europe for a few years now, visited quite a few cities and towns. A trip to Europe is on everyone's bucket list. We love to take pictures of beautiful city-centres with cobbled-stone alleys and street markets, maybe the dome of a church in the background. Beautiful walks along rivers, posing in front of monuments. Now imagine if there wasn't a park in front of the Eifel tower but hundreds of honking cars and vehicles on a regular, busy Parisian street. Or the Colosseum being ringed by broad streets full of heavy traffic. 

The point isn't that Rome or Paris don't have traffic issues. However, when they want to put their best foot forward, when they want tourists to have a good time and visit again and again and bring in all that revenue, they eliminate cars and vehicles from the setting. They plant trees or set-up a lawn or a garden, block traffic and allow people to move around. How often do you hear about a collision between two people being fatal? A large congregation of people leads to a lively hum of festivity and chatter, not honking and smoke. 

When vehicles pass through a crowd of pedestrians, it's always extremely unpleasant for pedestrian and driver, while also being dangerous. If you ever walk down 8th cross Malleswaram from Margosa Road to Sampige Road on any given evening, you will see it unfold right in front of your eyes. Two-wheelers irresponsibly whizzing past crowds of people. Auto-rickshaw drivers who assume that if they race down the road constantly blowing their horns, they gain some God-given right to the road-space. 

It's the same with Eat-Street in VV Pura. It's the same with Church Street - Church Street was converted into a pedestrian only street, but I don't know why that was changed. Cubbon Park is closed to vehicles on Sundays - and you immediately see the huge crowds that turn up.

In India however, there's an even bigger problem - cars which aren't being used. Walk on any street and just look at how much public space, whether road space or pedestrian space, is occupied by cars just parked there. This might be outside private homes because people don't want to use precious and over-inflated real estate on car-parking. Or it might be on busy roads, where every cosy corner is taken up by some parked vehicle. (try to count the number of parked cars on the sides of this rather broad street in the picture below!) Even if two-wheelers are the culprits often in clogging up the streets and extremely wayward, dangerous driving, ultimately the space crunch is caused by the large number of cars. Bengaluru has an insane 1.16 crore private vehicles! 1.6 lakh cars were registered in fiscal year 2023-24 alone. 

This while road networks have remained the same apart from a few flyovers or widened roads here and there. Bus fleet number has remained stagnant for more than a decade. And progress on the metro has been quite slow. The situation is particularly dire given that compared to other metropolitan cities in the world, the city fares very poorly in road density (km of road per square km). It's around 1/3rd of Delhi, for example. There simply is no space, and no space to add more space.

That doesn't mean cars don't have their utility - cars and roadways are often the only way to reach certain areas. Personal cars are a lifeline in times of emergencies. They're sometimes essential for older people or those with disabilities. And let's face it, they're great marvels of engineering and amazing machines! But when they're everywhere in cities and people are forced to slink away, then they become an intrusion.

In fact, I would argue that genuine car-lovers, those who love driving for entertainment must be the strongest advocates of eliminating cars and private vehicles from public places in cities as much as possible. Pedestrians, unlike cars, are easy to manage and manoeuvre and occupy very little space. Let the streets be freer for people and for car users, by taking cars off the streets.

Part 1 - The scale of Bengaluru

I have recently had some evolving thoughts on cities, transport, the environment, etc. This is the first part. I don't necessarily promise a second part. 

I remember the first time I walked past the Jalahalli metro station in northern Bengaluru. There was something fearsome and intimidating about it. Fast moving trucks and buses zipping past you, their loud honks echoing off those tall, imposing, grey concrete pillars. The air was dusty and filled with the sounds of the city. You couldn't see the sky or much green - mostly the light brown of dust and the gray of concrete. 

It was one of the first times Bengaluru had tripped me up. I grew up in the quieter, older part of Bengaluru, close to Malleswaram (technically within Malleswaram by pincode, but there exist Malleswaram purists who will contest this claim). For me Bengaluru consisted of the central part of the city (MG Road, Cubbon Park and surrounding areas), Malleswaram (home), Rajajinagar (school), Jayanagar (cousin's home) and Lalbagh (on the route from home to cousin's home). Cantonment, RT Nagar, Ulsoor, Indiranagar, these were areas I knew reasonably well because my father's office was in the Eastern part of the city while the Western parts of the city were familiar because my school was a bit to the west and most of my schoolmates had their homes in that part of the city. 

Growing up, I had the theoretical knowledge that Bengaluru was expanding absolutely rapidly but I had never truly experienced it first hand. I didn't really go around much during my school days apart from Sunday mornings to play cricket or football. Those in my family would also mention how IISc was considered to be in an isolated area to the north of the city, to be avoided after dark. Or how South End Circle was so named because it really was the southern end of the city. I hadn't really spent much time in the core areas of KR Market or Chikpete.

I left Bengaluru to go to college at 18 and it was only there that I really started to be "out-going" in the literal sense of the word - moving around for the sake of moving around and entertainment. I returned in 2017 at age 22 for an internship at ICTS, "Bengaluru". ICTS is really located in a remote area, surrounded by green fields and connected to the main city by a solitary bus route. I once missed the shuttle bus that plied between IISc and ICTS. Rather than wait for the next one, I decided I would plot a way to reach ICTS on my own. I got on a bus that I knew went roughly north with some idea about which way it would go. (In hindsight, I really don't know why I didn't just check google maps!) 

I don't completely recall the exact details of the day - The bus made a turn where I didn't expect it to make a turn and I realised I was wrong about its destination. So I got off at the next place and decided to walk towards Jalahalli metro station. 

My logic was airtight - ICTS was to the north of the city and Jalahalli metro station was on the green line which ran North-South. So if I went north, I would get closer to ICTS and somehow reach there eventually.

When I started walking towards Jalahalli, I whipped out my phone to see how long it would take. About an hour, said Gooogle. I was absolutely stumped!! 

I'd checked on the map before, they were right next to each other. I'd have guessed the distance to be 3 km at the most. 

I was completely wrong. The reason I was wrong was because if the map was zoomed out enough that my home (Malleswaram) and Jalahalli were both visible, the map scale was large. Two points that look adjacent could actually be quite well separated. I felt Jalahalli is "right there", just a bit north of Yeshvantpur, which was a bit north of Malleswaram. These bits of north, however, add up really quickly. And once distances get so large, you can go north in a slightly different angle and end up 6 km away from Jalahalli instead of the presumed 2. 

I quickly jumped on a passing autorickshaw and asked him to take me to Jalahalli and this was how I found myself at Jalahalli station. 

Jalahalli station was actually quite familiar to me in a different way.  When I visited home from college, I would usually take the overnight bus and arrive in Bengaluru in the morning. The bus-route coming in from the north ran parallel to the metro line. The usual routine was that the bus would stop for breakfast at a restaurant near Chitradurga at around 6 am. I would eat a piping hot Vada dipped in saambar and feel glad to be back well south of the Vindhyas. 

With my stomach and soul thus satisfied, I would happily watch the scenery go by as we approached Bengaluru, the city of my childhood. Reaching the northernmost station of the metro line was a sign that home was quite close now, and I would eagerly watch the trains plying up and down, trying to recall the exact order of the stations that passed by. I thus knew the general lay of the land, though from the comfort of an AC bus. 

In hindsight I think I can pinpoint exactly what about Jalahalli station that day made me feel intimidated - it was the first time I felt like I'm in a big city. A bustling metropolis, where my existence was miniscule and insignificant. It was that day that I realised the scale of the city. Prior to that, walking the streets of the older parts of the city that I knew very well, I felt like a minor Lord of the land. It all felt very familiar, like home. (idh ella namdhe adda type feels)

Now I've grown accustomed to discovering entire swathes of Bengaluru housing lakhs of people that I've never heard of. The regions that newcomers to the city know as the heart of the city - HSR layout, Electronic City, Whitefield, Sarjapur, Sahakarnagar - these are completely foreign lands to me. 

Something fundamental about my map of the city changed that day - Bengaluru ceased to be a "human-scale" city in my mind. It never was a human-scale city even when I was growing up. But it was close enough that I could build that illusion in my head. And either way, apart from some trips to Jayanagar, a large part of my life played out within a circle with a radius about 4-5 km, with a majority of that being in a circle with radius 1 km. My grandfather's house, shops, stores, doctors, etc. were all within a short walk away.

A human-scale city is a city where a reasonably fit human being can be expected to reach anywhere expending his/her own energy - either by walking or by bike. And there was something more comforting about believing I'm in a human-scale city.

PS - To complete the story, I realised that going north of Jalahalli on the metro would leave me in complete no-man's land with respect to reaching ICTS. I actually took an auto back from Jalahalli station to where I came from and took another bus going towards ICTS, got down mid-way where I knew the shuttle bus stopped.