A workable, sustainable mobility agenda for 2024 for Bengaluru Premium

A brand new year is upon us, and yet, Bengaluru’s mobility agenda remains chaotic and clueless as ever. Is there a way to make sense of the mishmash of roads, incomplete flyovers, skeletal Metro pillars, slow-paced suburban rail work and grand tunnel visions? Can a workable, sustainable, well thought-out mobility plan take shape, freeing Bengalureans from this vicious cycle of despair?

A brand new year is upon us, and yet, Bengaluru’s mobility agenda remains chaotic and clueless as ever. Is there a way to make sense of the mishmash of roads, incomplete flyovers, skeletal Metro pillars, slow-paced suburban rail work and grand tunnel visions? Can a workable, sustainable, well thought-out mobility plan take shape, freeing Bengalureans from this vicious cycle of despair?

This is possible, but only if the foundation, a strong institutional mechanism called the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Authority (BMLTA) is allowed to emerge as a strong regulatory body. Independent mobility consultant Satya Arikutharam notes that the state government has failed to constitute the body even a year after the BMLTA bill was passed.

The law itself, he reminds, clearly states that the Authority should be in place within six months of passage of the bill. “The BMLTA has to be professionally run, and be proactive. It should put together a comprehensive mobility plan (CMP), with accountability from all the delivery agencies including the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) and the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP),” he elaborates.

The lack of a master plan and a CMP has already left the city in a mammoth mess. A course correction could be attempted this year. Satya cites the Shivaram Karanth Layout, with about 34,000 sites to be sold over the next six months to a year. “What about the transport requirements of the layout? Nobody has a plan.”

A fully functional BMLTA could direct the BMTC to analyse the mobility demands of the new layout, prepare a plan to acquire and deliver the required buses. “The transport corporation can do some financial planning and get the buses. BMTC is perennially trying to catch up with its finances.”

Temporary, ad-hoc transport interventions and costly retrofits have left the city in deep chaos. Planning ahead is the key. As Satya puts it, “The sites will not transform into houses overnight, it could take four to five years. That is the lead time to plan bus stops and ensure that people heading to and from the layout always use public and not private transport. So land use and transport planning should be the first priority of BMLTA.”

Speeding up work on the suburban rail corridors is another big ask. Here too, the BMLTA will have a monitoring task, ensuring that the lines are well integrated with the BMTC and Metro. But this can happen only if the two agencies do not look at each other as competitors. Satya says: “They should instead be complementing each other to increase the pie of the public transport mode share. If the BMLTA comes in as a regulator, it has the statutory backing to ensure some sort of integration.”