About 4 years ago, Bangalore got its spanking new 200 ft wide double laned with 40 feet service lanes, Outer Ring road...
One would drive up here to break free from the traffic snarls elsewhere in the city...and check if their spanky investments still worked at high speeds.
Mostly worked fine, until a small hitch started showing up first little, then some more... and these days in full measure...
The hitch is what I call "minority-biased-junctions"... Bangalore's archaic mechanism of junction management...let me explain..
1) There is a very wide road, which is the highway, and contributes 80-90% of the traffic of the junction
2) The perpendicular "feeder" road is more like a 30-40 ft wide street, basically an outlet for the settlements off the highway, and contributes 10-15% traffic of the junction
3) There are no traffic lights (if they are a fair chance they will not work)
4) The "minority bias" is a speed breaker, placed not on this "feeder road" but on only on the highway in both directions.
6) What happens as illustrated above is that while the 70-80 Km/h highway traffic slows to a halt, the "feeder" traffic from the jumps on the highway as there are no deterrents, human, electronic or physical to it...
7)...and the 80:20 rule plays out...20% of traffic gets 80% of the junction time and 80% gets 20% of it...
Perhaps the idea was the same socialist one - tax the big road folks to feed the smaller road folks..problem is, it works about as much as socialism did for us.
In peak hours, you have a mile of traffic build up on this 200 ft wide highway, while the 30 ft wide street traffic jumps right on the road, nearly no waiting ...
This problem is not new, it got worse on the Hosur Road before we got lucky with a 9 KM elevated road ...so no junctions possible... but unlikely we'll get as lucky again...
So please, planners can you try wake up to some simpler solutions like simple signals adjusted to the traffic flow and do away with these "minority-bias" speed breakers!
