If at once you fail...

Long back before my wedding, I was compelled to organize my stuff! Yup, I hate keeping things neat! Anyways, I came across a paper with various quotes written on it. One of them, probably my favorite, came back to my mind yesterday after reading the news article, ‘Two-way BRT on Jangli Maharaj Road!’

My home is situated on Pune-Satara Road, the first scapegoat for the BRT experiment that started in 2006. I witnessed everything that happened during the pilot project; numerous accidental deaths, vandalism and PMT (now part of PMPML) employees cursing the MP who initiated this project. It all started when our brilliant ministers decided to blindly mimic this transport system, details of which are in my previous post. The project was soon tried on Pune-Solapur road where it again proved to be useless.

I feel, the width of roads in Pune is not enough for BRT. Secondly, the so-called cycle tracks and footpaths are misused and have just become a different terrain for motorized two wheeler riders to go faster. And lastly, the variable width of road causes lots of bottlenecks.

Now this proposed plan for JM road BRT, which will be implemented shortly after Pune-Nagar Road, has separate lanes for buses, two wheelers, pedestrians, and cyclists. The BRT will start from the crowded crossroads near COEP hostel and end at an equally crowded Garware flyover near Deccan Gymkhana. At both these ends, the roads leading to and out of the proposed BRT corridor are narrow and are definitely going to create bottlenecks, resulting in more chaos and crowd. On top of it, I have seen bus drivers rushing in BRT corridors as if they’re part of PM’s fleet, which is going to lead to accidents.

I once read a report which stated that people only save 9 minutes if they travel at speeds more than the permitted 80km/hr on 90km stretch of Mumbai-Pune express highway. I have even seen people driving at 180km/hr! Eventually, the ghat section of Lonavala and Khandala slows down all vehicles due to lots of bottlenecks and slopes. Now I wonder how much time a bus, with poorer performance compared to an SUV, is going to save on the 2 km stretch of JM road with the aid of BRT system.

Thomas Edison needed 10000 attempts to create a light bulb. I think everyone would agree that Edison’s experiments would never have harmed a million people at large and had higher risk reward ratio as compared to the BRT system. You’ll understand my reference to Thomas Edison when you get to know the quote which read- ‘If at once you fail, try again; and then quit. No point in being a damn fool about it’.