Commute Easy, which was successful in Bangalore, Pune and Kolkata, is now in Chennai. Around 300 Chennaiites have registered (as of 16^th November) to find people within a 1km radius whose work timings and route to office match theirs.

Car-pooling is the sharing of rides in a private vehicle among two or more individuals. It involves the use of one person’s private or company vehicle to carry one or more fellow passengers. Car-pooling is the easiest and most common ridesharing arrangement. It usually consists of two or more persons commuting in a vehicle. Sometimes car-poolers share driving, and other responsibilities.

In some cases, one person does all the driving and is reimbursed for mileage by his or her riders.  The car-pool driver may pick up passengers from their home or the passenger may find a way to get to the driver’s home at a specified time or they may meet at a particular location. This is in practice in most parts of world to save oil, save parking space and reduce travel demand.

According to Commute Easy founder Vipul Kasera “Many motorists are looking for similar platforms but such initiatives are yet to become popular in the country when compared to other countries”. Lack of awareness rather promotion is the primary reason for this drawback. In a Country which has close to 100 million Internet subscribers, it shouldn’t be a herculean task to promote such initiatives. Social Networking sites offer a platform for free and easy promotion.

Udit Bhandari, founder of indimoto.com, a website that was among the first to launch carpool communities in April 2006, opines that, “Lack of incentives is a big problem hindering the growth of car-pooling in the country,”

Car-pooling can be promoted by giving benefits to people using such methods to commute. Waiving parking charges is one common method adopted by corporate companies around the world. In several countries separate lanes have been provided for people who carpool and their toll charges are subsidized if the car has full occupancy. These could be some incentives that can be looked at in the long term for Indian conditions.

With increasing usage of GPS-enabled smartphones, dynamic car-pooling is also possible. Users will be able to plot throughGPS units those who are likely to require transport on the same route on a real-time basis and use that to their car-pool advantage.

In conclusion, creating awareness and promotion of car-pooling can do wonders if supplemented by a coordination of companies and government bodies in providing incentives to such users.

References

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/-Chennaiites-look-to-car pooling/articleshow/10749890.cms

http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/article2624847.ece

– Iyal Pari

The National Advisory Council recently issued recommendations for changes to the Rajiv Awas Yojana, the slum-free cities program that the Congress government has been talking about since they were elected. The program has so far only been enacted as a pilot in certain cities, but it looks like the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation is gearing up for a larger scale project.

To my eyes, the design of the Rajiv Awas Yojana had left something to be desired. The danger in a program designed to create “slum-free cities” is that in practice, it would result in the widespread displacement of slums to the city’s outskirts rather than the accommodation of slum-dwellers in better quality homes with access to services within the city. There did not seem to be enough safeguards in the RAY against this happening. The NAC’s critiques address this issue and many others as well.

What are the NAC’s primary gripes with the current structure of the RAY? Firstly, they argue that the RAY’s definition of slums excludes many in the urban poor living in informal settlements. These include the “ultra-poor”: homeless people, people who live on the pavements, parks, vacant lands, and waste dumps, construction workers, and domestic workers who live in their employers’ houses. The NAC also argues that the definition of a slum used in the RAY, which requires any settlement of at least 20 households to be counted as a slum, leaves out the poor scattered in the city in smaller settlements who are usually the most vulnerable among slum dwellers. The NAC also notes that in some states, the RAY only covers those in notified slums, even though in cities like Chennai, new slums have not been recognized for decades. This has happened despite the RAY’s explicit focus on breaking down barriers between recognized and unrecognized slums.

Secondly, the NAC is concerned with increasing the transparency of the processes under the RAY and increasing citizen participation. The report argues that mapping and survey processes to determine the locations of eligible residents need to be widely publicized, and should be conducted by the Collector along with slum-dwellers and students (in Chennai, the Slum Board is using a consultant for this). The NAC also states that there needs to be an appeals process so that individuals and settlements that have been left out can appeal to be included. The current structure of the RAY leaves it up to cities to decide whether slum locations are tenable or not, or whether slums need to be relocated. The NAC suggests that decisions about tenability need to be taken through a specified process, and suggests that a committee with the Collector, officials, and slum-dwellers be formed to take decisions on tenability.

They also argue that the spaces for community participation currently built into the RAY are “rather passive,” and suggest changes to make community participation central to the scheme. These include making sure that community consultations are mandatory to all stages of RAY, from mapping to design to settlement. To ensure that community participation is not merely tokenistic, they say that the link between community participation and decision making needs to be clearly delineated and that successive disbursements of funds from the government should be premised on adequate participation. They also outline ways in which the capacities and responsibilities of CBOs in cities can be enhanced and institutionalized through the RAY, to further improve participation in the future.

Thirdly, the NAC is concerned with preventing current and future displacement of slums as much as possible. The RAY guidelines emphasize in-situ redevelopment, but the program does not have any incentives or structures in place to minimize slum relocation. Unfortunately, in most cities, eviction of slums and relocation to the outskirts – if they’re lucky! – has been the standard practice. And according to the NAC, the early test runs of the RAY have seen more of the same happening.

So how can RAY be restructured to prevent this from happening? Part of the problem will be addressed if procedures to decide whether slum-land is “tenable” or “viable” for in-situ redevelopment become less arbitrary and more transparent, which I discussed above. The NAC report also says that resettlement sites need to be selected and houses designed in consultation with residents. The NAC also suggests that for slum-dwellers on tenable land, full property rights should be granted to the individual, and the question of whether their title should be for the land or for the house should be left to the slum community as a whole to decide upon.

But the recommendations also look to the future – the report states that the RAY should reserve 25 to 40% of the land in the city for housing the urban poor. This seems like an awful lot of land, and unrealistic, especially given that slums occupy such a miniscule percentage of city lands now. Regardless, the NAC’s recommendations would go a long way towards rectifying some of the dangers of the RAY in its current form.

- Nithya V Raman

One-way roads have proven to be a useful method for easing traffic flow in major cities, especially in congested areas like the central business districts. The usual methodology followed is to have parallel roads beginning at common areas and ending at common areas have opposing flows of traffic. The network formed by M.G. Road, Brigade Road, Church Street, F.M. Cariappa Road and St. Mark’s Road in Bangalore can be taken as a prime example. In Calcutta, one can consider the network formed by A.J.C. Bose Road, Park Street, J.N. Road and Shakespeare Sarani as an example. In Bombay, the Nariman Point area is interspersed with arterial roads like the Madam Cama Road, Marine Drive, Jamshedji Tata Road, and all streets connecting these are one-way.

Chennai, however, has a peculiar aversion to one-way roads. Over the last decade, many attempts at creating one-way roads have failed. Three prime examples that can be considered are: (1) the network formed by Cenotaph Road, Anna Salai and Chamiers Road; (2) the network formed by T.T.K. Road, C.P. Ramaswamy Road and Chamiers Road; and, (3) the network formed by R.K. Mutt Road, Thiru Vi Ka Road, Kutchery Road and Oliver Road. Out of these experiments tried out by the Chennai Traffic Police (CTP), only the last one is still functional, resulting in considerably smoother flow of traffic and significantly lesser snarls.

Looking at the two failed cases, the first one was actually very suitable to the concept of one-way flow of traffic since Cenotaph Road, in particular, is narrow, and has had a significant road area reduced by the construction of an elevated road to connect it to Gandhi Mandapam Road at Nandanam. The CTP did introduce one-way system at this network, but backtracked within two-months due to continuous breaking of rules by the motorists using these roads.

Similarly, the one-way network formed by C.P. Ramaswamy Road, T.T.K. Road and Chamiers Road had to be discontinued due to the same reason.

In all fairness to the users of the road, both the above networks were ill conceived by the CTP: the starting and ending points were illogical. In the first case, a small stretch of Chamiers leading from Nandanam to Anna Salai was allowed to be two-way for the benefit of a small high-end residential area. In the second case, the entire stretch of the T.T.K. Road from Chamiers Road to Alwarpet was one-way, but C.P. Ramaswamy Road was one-way only from the St. Mary’s Road junction to Alwarpet.

But users too took advantage of the bad design, and stretched their breaking of rules to the extent of the roads not monitored by the CTP.

Perhaps using public hearings and with more stringent monitoring of traffic, the CTP will be able to introduce one-way traffic flows to ease traffic snarls and build-ups in many congested areas of Chennai. Obviously, one area begging for some intervention is T. Nagar.

Guest writer: Arindam Jana is a Researcher with the Small Enterprise Finance Centre housed at the Institute for Financial Management and Research.

Transparent Chennai’s research on road safety and pedestrian infrastructure has so far shed light on the increasing number of road accidents in the city, and the type of vehicular traffic (scooterists, cyclists, autorickshaws, four wheelers etc) that is affected the most during these accidents. There has been so much hype about the limited space for pedestrians, yet not much of this information has been quantified to say anything meaningful. Transparent Chennai gathered information about pedestrian infrastructure in the city, and through this post we will share some of our key findings. The information was collected from the Corporation of Chennai, the city road division of the Highway Department and the Chennai Traffic Police.

By pedestrian infrastructure we mean any infrastructure that makes walking easier on roads. These can be categorised into pavements, subways and foot-over bridges, traffic signals and traffic calmer (zebra crossing, mid block crossing, speed breakers etc).

The city has a network of almost 830 km long stretches of footpath, the width of these vary from 0.6 meters to 3.5 meters (Table 1). There are 25 subways, of which 17 are maintained by the city road division of the Highway Department and 32 foot over bridges maintained by the Corporation of Chennai.

There are 218 traffic signals of which only 39 facilitate pedestrian movement.There are 29 CCTV camera points of which 12 are localized. There are 425 zebra crossings, 185 bumpy speed breakers most of which lie in the Annanagar division as it has many schools and other institutions. These are being maintained by the Chennai Traffic police.
According to a pedestrian guideline, IRC: 103-1988, the minimum width of a pavement should be 1.5m and unobstructed. However, over 52% of the sidewalks in the city are not even 1.5m wide.

Table 1: Distribution of pavements less than 1 m Zone wise

Table 2: Distribution of pavements 1.5m wide zone wise

Table 3: Inventory of pavements (Zone wise)

Source: Analysis done based on the data provided by individual zone offices collected from all the 10 zones through RTI filed on 27th January 2011

The authorities argue that building more pavements will result in encroachment by hawkers but the analysis shows that hawkers occupy only about 3.5% of all pavements in the city of which 63% lies in zone 8 and 3. Zone 8(Kodambakkam) which is the commercial hub of the city has a little over 5% of its footpath encroached by hawkers, while Zone 3 (Pattalam) has over 15% of its footpaths occupied by hawkers. Zone 2 has about 10% of its pavements encroached by hawkers. North Madras (Zone 1,2 and 3) is the most dense part of the city and has less than 13% of the total pavements of the city which accommodates 29% of the vending stretches in the city.

This analysis is based on the data records available with the zonal offices. Please see the Our Data section of the road safety research for raw data.

Roshan Toshniwal

The Chennai City Traffic Police has started an interesting new initiative. A Facebook page that the CCTP started last year has once again become active under the initiative of the motivated new Deputy Commissioner of Traffic Sanjay Arora. Every day, the CCTP updates their status multiple times, indicating where traffic is moving slowly, where buses have broken down, and answering people’s queries about arcane traffic rules. The page, like the Delhi Traffic Police page, also fines vehicles that are in violation of the rules based on photographs sent in by users.

On the whole, most people are big fans of the CCTP’s initiative, and are commending them for improving the information flow and for taking prompt action on citizen complaints about problems. However, the page also sees a fair amount of abuse from users, who complain about corrupt traffic cops, and complain (quite rightly) that illegal parking takes place because there is almost no legal parking in the city.

Whoever is updating the CCTP’s Facebook page seems also to be extremely frustrated with the system. One update said

“Some people have pointed out that, why a single car breaking down necessitates alternate route. Most of our roads are carrying many times more than their capacity. In another words they are really saturated and traffic moves very slowly during peak period even without any obstruction on the road. In such conditions even a single event like, vehicle break down, maintenances activity, accident, rain, funeral processes, marriage in nearby kalyanamandapam etc. have adverse impact on traffic and the cascading effect goes up to couple of kilometers including various connecting roads. … The concept of peak hour has also got extended to peak period with non peak period shrinking at a accelerated rate.”

You can almost hear the weary police officer sighing as he writes this!

On Friday, the CCTP announced a new initiative, in which free sms’s will be sent to all those who subscribe with regular traffic alerts of the sort given out on Facebook. (For those interested in these updates, send an SMS with the text “JOIN CTP” to the number 09219592195.)

It is unclear, though, how useful these updates will be. Will people avoid using certain junctions if they are backed up? Are there enough alternate routes and detours that will enable traffic jams not to proliferate if people are given advance warning?

For Transparent Chennai, what might be more interesting is to use the data collected here on traffic jams and bus breakdowns to see whether there are patterns emerging. Are there particular areas which get backed up all the time? And can we fix those places using better planning?

Nithya V Raman

Akshai Abraham

This week, we have added a new module to the site which allows users to search and download documents related to Chennai. We have painstakingly collected these documents over a period of 14 months from various sources including visits to various libraries and government offices, filing RTIs, and searches in the public domain. We are still in the process of cataloging our repository of documents and also digitizing various datasets from paper form to usable formats. We hope that at these documents will be of use to concerned citizens who wish to know more about the planning of their city.

We have also recently uploaded a layer on Solid Waste Management (Garbage Infrastructure) on our maps section as well as an online polling feature and registration to our mailing list on our blog section. Stay tuned and do keep checking in.

Some quick usage stats from Google Analytics:

Though this site has been live and attracting users for over 6 months, we revamped the site and launched on the 4^th of October. Since that date, we have had over 11,000 visits (in about 50 days). About 8850 of these are unique visits (new users) These 8000+ users have spent an average of approximately 5 minutes on the site and there have been over 53,600 page views! Considering the niche segment the site caters to (citizens concerned about one particular city in India), these are very heartening statistics.

 Picture 1: Around 80 per cent of the hits to the site came from new users.

In terms of sources of traffic, we have attracted quite a lot of international visitors (Picture 2) with hits from 65 countries. The USA, Singapore, UAE and UK top the list of international visits by country.

Picture 2

Within India (Picture 3), we have had the highest number of visits from Chennai (obviously) followed by Bangalore, Coimbatore, Mumbai, Thanjavur, Erode and Hyderabad.

Picture 3: A lot of hits from Chennai

It has been a while since I last blogged. I could not find an appropriate topic to blog about. Moreover, the team has been blogging regularly about latest events and updates, so I waited till I was adequately inspired to put down my thoughts in words. Today seems to be the day. As I sit at home enjoying the long weekend, I can’t help but think about Transparent Chennai, and the team’s dream to make it a citizens-led platform. Each and every member of our team has an aspiration for this polluted and crowded yet strikingly beautiful city of Chennai. After the successful launch of our website, our aspirations and dreams look slightly more realistic and achievable. By asking our users to contribute, we have moved one step closer to our dream. There is this one thought that keeps the team going – ‘What if Transparent Chennai succeeds in its endeavor to empower its citizens?’ While that remains a question to be answered in due time, one might wonder who the real master minds are behind the project.

I would call them the men ‘behind the scenes’. Prabu Raja from the tech team, without whom our mapping project would have been impossible, says “I am very fond of mapping and work towards improving the technology for development. I want to leverage my skills to reach out to the citizens by allowing them to view data on exciting and easy-to-understand maps.” When asked about the city, Prabu tells me, “I hate traffic jams and I feel sad about slum dwellers living close to Cooum who suffer the most when Chennai gets flooded during incessant rains. Chennai in my dreams would be a city where all these issues have been taken care of.” Muthukumaran, who sits right next to Prabu, shares similar thoughts. “I really enjoy working on this project because the very idea that I can reach out to Chennai’s residents through this medium excites me,” says Muthu. “I only hope that people appreciate this project and come forward to join us in this modest effort of ours to change Chennai for the better.” Muthu is the man behind the interesting design of the website which has evolved over time  to become more user-friendly and catchy.

Meryl Mary Sebastian, our longest standing intern, leads a hapless life as she goes around from one zonal office to the other searching for mapable data. She might be the youngest member in our team but don’t you underestimate her skills to gather and organize data. “This project introduced me to ideas of how and what a city could be. I love that we are creating a space for information that will empower and encourage the citizens of Chennai to participate in the planning and shaping of their city,” says our intern. All that she aspires for is a ‘clean and green Chennai!’ Our newest member Vaishnavi Narasimhan has been on a roll ever since she joined the project. When questioned, she gives a curt reply – “I would like to see more trees and less garbage.” Vaishnavi has been traveling to each and every place in the city where one can find heaps of garbage. If you are a resident of Chennai, you would know that her task is practically endless. She also loves chatting up with groups and organizations and has been crucial in getting the project its due publicity.  We have one another Muthu working from home, who is invisible even to the team, but his work speaks for him. Whenever we have a problem of transferring data to the GIS platform, we look towards Muthu for solutions. His data cleaning work involves a lot of patience and time, and the team in its entirety was really happy to meet him during the launch of TC!

There have been 10 more interns for this project from different parts of the world who came and worked with us because they found the project interesting and exciting. All these members are invisible to the citizens we reach out to, but they are undoubtedly the real face of this project. Three cheers to all of you out there. Of course, there is something about this project that brings us all together – this project is about how we can make each and every day of our lives better. The website has massive potential which can be realized when more, and eventually all of us, come together and realize our duty to voice our opinions as informed and empowered residents of Chennai. Imagine- One day all of you MIGHT have enough walking space in Chennai, an excellent public transport which takes you to your destination in no time, a flyover which serves its very purpose, pollution free roads and parks, a clean and hygienic place to pee whenever you feel like and not having to hold it till you reach home, door to door collection of garbage and no mountains of smelly filth strewn around the streets of Chennai! Nobody but you can change this ‘MIGHT’ to ‘WILL’. We have already taken a number of steps towards getting closer to our dream and probably yours as well, but the rest is your responsibility.

Contact us immediately!

Posted by Somya Sethuraman