[sustran] Reply to Prof. JKG Discipline is needed

[Sunny]

Dear Prof,

Very nice to see ur mail. from my point of view seeing Indian cities 
Bangkok and other Thai cities where car dependency is much more than 
India I feel that though strict traffic rules are implemented it might 
not reduce the traffic growth. If you compare the driving behaviour of 
Thais and Indians I would say that Thais stick to the rules, while many 
of us Indians do not care for a traffic signal when the road is clean. 
Fines would be a great idea but in India the need is more for a much 
stricter discipline among the police officials in not being corrupt. In 
my home town,Visakhapatnam, and my capital city, Hyderabad, I have seen 
traffic police checking motorists in the first and last weeks of the 
months and many of them usually take a bribe starting from 50 rupees, I 
say this as I personally experienced this situation, inspite of having 
all the required documents i was fined because my motorbike did not have 
a black dot on the headlight.

So I feel that enforcing traffic rules would be a great idea for the 
sake of a policy but for the implementation it will be filling the 
pockets of the policemen and the constables and people driving usually 
get a belief that even if the police catches without a drivers license a 
200 rupees in the pocket is enough to get away with, when this attitude 
of the police changes then we might see this present chaos into an 
"Organised Chaos".

To solve this Organised Chaos even I agree with you that contemporary 
engineering solutions do no good but rather we need a social approach. 
More technological solutions will only result disadvantaging the 
vulnerable groups like the pedestrian overpasses that infest Bangkok and 
I have seen some even on the National Highways in Thailand.

Another comment on the countdown signals, I presume that this method of 
ITS is disadvantageous since it can tend to increase the drivers speed 
on seeing a smaller number...kindly correct me if i understood it wrong.

Coming to the main idea wht I understand from Sujit's comment was the 
issue of solving the growing need of personal mobility and a new 
solution for the present problems. I would suggest a solution that 
incorporates every user except the car user. I would ask Sujit if there 
is a possibility of introducing shared space in Pune,as I have never 
been to this wonderful city and have only heard both the good and bad 
sides of it.

Shared space concept was received very well in European countries and it 
is an idea in which the car user is not given the false idea that they 
are the kings of the road and everyone else have to give way for them 
but instead in a shared space cars need to wait for the people....I 
guess many other members on this forum have personally experienced the 
merits and demerits of shared space and would be kind enough to throw 
more light on this area. I guess this idea would be good for developing 
cities like in India where we can cut the feeling of road ownership of 
car users at the roots.

I would like your and other members comments on the same.

Sincerely,
Sunny