Category: bangalore

The journey back home

It was almost 945 when I started back from the MG Road area this evening. The day travel card I had bought earlier was in my right knee pocket. I heard some people at the Chinnaswamy Stadium bus stop complain that there hadn’t been a bus that way for a very long time. Bus number 20 presently arrived, but couldn’t reach the stop due to the pile-up of traffic from the signal at the Mahatma Gandhi circle. I ran back towards the bus and was lucky to find the doors open.

The new BMTC bus stand in Shantinagar seems to be a major churning point. More than half the people in the bus got down over there (thus ensuring I had a place to sit) and a similar number quickly got in. I think more bus interchanges should be encouraged at this stop. In fact, this is better than Majestic or Market as a hub, since it will be a dedicated hub without being an origin or destination.

I got off at Lalbagh main gate, hoping to catch either 12B which would drop me at Deve Gowda petrol bunk, or some bus that would deposit me at the Ramakrishna Ashram. I found neither. I ended up in a Janapriya Vahini no. 2 which I planned to take till fifth block. By observing the crowd at the bus stop in fourth block, I learned that there hadn’t been a bus towards my area for a long time. And I started wondering why none of them practised bus hopping.

Yet another bus later, I was at the Banashankari bus station, which is something like a black hole for buses late in the night. Buses arrived, unloaded all their passengers and parked for the night. Nothing was leaving the bus stand. Nothing in the general direction of Kathriguppe at least. Road works at the Kadirenahalli cross also meant that I didn’t really know where to stand. It wouldn’t have mattered since no bus was leaving the stand.

It was the first time in ages that I saw auto drivers competing to ferry me home. Some three of them seemed keen, and all of them offered to ferry me at 1.5 times the meter – which is the regulated late night rate. They resolved the fight quickly and I was soon in an autorickshaw. Rupees forty from Banashankari Bus Station to Kathriguppe. Earlier in the day it had been rupees thirty from Kathriguppe to M G Road and back to Banashankari Bus Station. As i keep saying, choice of mode of transport is made keeping in mind cost, time and convenience.

The Third Bangalore Photowalk

Happened this Sunday, between 8 and 1030 am. Eighteen people turned up. The bad news is that there is very little “repeat business”.

[info]harithekid

?is the only person (apart from me) to have appeared in all three photowalks.

[info]aneeta_04

and Shande were the only “repeaters” from walk 2 to walk 3. This low “repeat ratio” kinda worries me, and I wonder if I’ve been doing a bad job of the whole thing.

People who have attende the walk (at least one of the three) please let me know what I can do to improve the experience. One problem I noticed during the second walk was that people just kept running off and soon there was a 500 metre gap between the first and last person in the group. I tried to remedy that this time by insisting that we largely move together, though I didn’t stop people from wandering away. After all, the objective of the walk is to allow everyone to take photos of what they find interesting.

I hope all those who attended this photo walk enjoyed the event, and I hope most of them will come back for the next one, which will happen on the 27th of July. I’ll get back to you people with details about the route soon. And in the meantime, if you wish to participate in further photo walks, I would encourage you to join the bangalore photowalk yahoo group. To join the group, send a mail to blorephotowalk-subscribe [at] yahoogroups [dot ] com .

Then, I request everyone who attended the photowalk to upload the pictures on Flickr and give the tag bangalorephotowalk . The pictures taken so far in all photowalks can be seen here: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/bangalorephotowalk/

Here is a photo of me giving gyaan at the beginning of the photo walk.

And here is a picture of the group at? the end of the photo walk.

Why fine dining costs so much in Bangalore

Blame the Bangarappa government of 1993, which took a decision to stop issuing more liquor licenses, a decision that still continues today.? According to

[info]themadman

?(who runs the excellent Shiok, currently temproarily closed), the only way one can start a restaurant serving liquor in Bangalore is to buy a permit from someone who is shutting shop. In other words, the number of establishments serving liquor in Bangalore has remained constant for some 15 years now, despite the population growing by a large amount.

Apart from the fact that the supply of licenses is scarce, a bigger problem is in matching buyers and sellers. It is reported that officials in the excise department double up as a clearing house for these licenses, charging usurious commissions up to the tune of 25% of the transaction value. Adding to this the official costs of licensing, transferring license and other sundry costs, a liquor license is estimated to cost approximately about Rs. 30 lakh.

What this means is that existing establishments can continue to overcharge on liquor without the fear of a new competitor who might threaten to lower the prices in the industry. However, given that liquor consumption, especially at restaurants, is highly elastic, there is only so much by which the liquor can be marked up. Thus, for the thousands of entrepreneurs who have started thousands of fine dining restaurants in the last few years, the only way in which they can recover their liquor investment, and make a profit would be to mark up the prices of food items.

Another thing with fine dining is that restaurants that serve liquor vastly outnumber the ones that don’t. This is mainly because of the clientile of these? restaurants, who usually prefer a drink to go with their food. This market (fine dining) is highly elastic to the availability of liquor – restaurants stand to lose considerable business if they don’t serve liquor. What this means is that restaurants serving liquor are dominant in this market, and they are the price setters. So when you have the high-cost players in the industry being the price setters, it is clear as to why prices are on the higher side.

On the other hand, when it comes to fast food, south indian food and south indian – north indian food (north indian food made in south indian style), the presence of restaurants that serve liquor is negligible, almsot non-existent. Hence, the price setters in this market are low-cost players, which explains why they are very reasonable.

Then, in Chennai, the? government has a monopoly over liquor distribution, which means that restaurants aren’t allowed to sell liquor. This makes it okay for a fine dining restaurant to run without serving liquor, and hence the price setters in the market are not high-cost. This probably explains why fine dining is much more reasonable in Chennai compared to Bangalore.

The only missing piece in this puzzle is the Andhra style restaurants – most of them serve liquor and are yet extremely reasonable. Or is it that they serve only beer which has a separate license that is available more freely? Can someone tell my why this is the case?

And interestingly, Bangarappa, who put a freeze on further liquor licenses, belongs to the Idiga community whose traditional occupation is to brew/extract and distribute liquor.

The Third Bangalore Photowalk

Just to remind you people, the third Bangalore Photo Walk will happen this Sunday, the 29th of June between 8 am and 10 am. We will start at the intersection of Brigade Road and Residency Road (in front of Rex). More details here: http://tinyurl.com/6ymzt8

Please bring along a camera. Any type will do. Even if you can’t bring one along, but just want to walk along you are welcome, but you should stick to the rest of the group. I would also recommend you to bring some drinking water, and maybe a cap.

The other day,

[info]harithekid

suggested that we move on to the Coffee House on M G Road for breakfast after the walk. We will keep this option open (officially, there’s no breakfast at the end of this walk). In case we decide to go to Coffee House, there will be a small change in the route. We won’t turn right from Museum Road on to Residency Road but instead walk on straight to hit M G Road. Anyway since we have agreed to keep the route of the walk uncertain, I’m sure we can live with this.

Going by my yahoo! inbox, the response to this photo walk has been fairly positive so far. Nevertheless, I request you to give further footage for the photowalk on your blogs, etc. Thanks to

[info]aneeta_04

for writing about it on her blog and Shande for putting it up on metblogs.

A little more on public transport

There are three factors that affect the choice of mode of transport – cost, time and convenience. You usually make the decision regarding what mode to take by evaluating how much you are willing to “spend” in terms of each of these. For example, if you live in Mumbai, taking the local train would be the most effective in terms of cost and time, but not really so in terms of convenience. Hence, you may sometimes give up time and cost and invest in a taxi so that you travel in better convenience.

This needs to be kept in mind when trying to design an efficient public transport system – the combination of cost, time and convenience needs to be attractive for the user to abandon private transport in favour of public. One mistake that is commonly made is to forget the convenience part, which leads to a large number of people to stick to their private transport. In related stuff, in my first ever post on the IEB, I had argued for segmented public transport so that people can find their own combinations within the public transport system.

This post is about the time aspect. The thing with a system based on buses is that you can do little about the time factor – unless you decide to create specific bus lanes, which aren’t too feasible currently in a place like Bangalore, you need to use the general road space. However, this is only as far as traveling time goes. What can, and should, be improved is waiting time.

Last week, while I was on my way to the M G Road area to meet sudheernarayan for the unofficial photowalk, I purchased a daily pass (for Rs. 30 you can travel on any bus from anywhere to anywhere else on that day). Though there exist direct buses from my place to MG Road, I figured out that it would be faster if I changed buses. Basic assumption was monotonicity – if bus A and bus B both go from point X to point Y, and if A reaches X before B, then A will reach Y before B. And that every time I went forward a small distance, that would increase my chances of getting a bus to the final destination.

So I take a random bus from my place to Banashankari – which improves the chances of getting a bus to MG Road by a factor of three. Then another 2 buses to fourth block – increases probability of getting bus by about 50%. By probability I mean the expected value of getting a bus to your destination in the next one second (I mean, assume Poisson distribution, etc.). I took four buses to get to M G Road but spent a total of five minutes waiting.

Now that the story is out of the way, the key to a good bus system would be to decrease waiting time. Right now, it’s quite horrible in Bangalore on a number of routes, as frequency of direct buses is low and changing is also quite difficult. And as for changing buses, there should be a system which makes interchanges easier – typically you should be able to switch buses by standing at the same bus stop.

Right now I need to go down to watch football, so I’ll write the second part of this post tomorrow. In that I’ll talk about how the network can be redesigned so as to decrease average waiting time for commuters. Of course, given the volumes and the fleet in operation today, one will need to introduce several more buses before the “convenience” bit becomes better.

Pleasant Observations

This morning, on the way to the gym, i saw a pleasant and wonderful sight. In fact, it was a curious problem but the solution gave me hope that the average intelligence in India is not too low.

It was shortly passed 7 am, and the traffic lights at South End Circle had just come on. However, the intersection itself was empty as vehicles stood on all six roads waiting for the light to turn green. After half a minute of observance, I think everyone figured out that there was a problem with the lights.

Soon traffic started flowing from the Madhavan Park side. No, there was no green light. However, the fact that it was red all around must have helped to keep the traffic from the other directions quiet. In ten seconds, all traffic from the Madhavan Park side had passed the intersection, and traffic flowed from Elephant Rock road (from the direction of Elephant Rock). Note that this was the natural order at that signal – the light turns green for the Madhavan Park side followed by the elephant rock side.

In another? twenty seconds, traffic from elephant rock had ceased, and people from both sides of RV Road began to move. Together. As it always happens when there are functioning lights or a policeman. As usual, this took longer than other directions, and then traffic flowed from the Yediyur side.

It was beautiful. It was as if there were functioning lights, or a traffic policeman in his place. It was probably self-regulation at its best. The fact that the light was red all around helped I think – people thought twice before jumping the signal. I thought it was one perfect round completed successfully as I started moving my car as soon as the Yediyur side emptied. Unfortunately, one BMTC bus on RV Road (coming from Lalbagh side) happened to jump the signal at that moment, and spoilt the few moments of bliss. Thankfully no one else followed suit, and traffic from my side passed peacefully.

I’m not sure what happened next but just the fact that Bangalore traffic, which has almost gone the Delhi way thanks to massive immigration from those parts and also the presence of Tata Sumos, could regulate itself perfectly for a minute or two was inspiring. Maybe it was a skewed sample. Yes, I don’t have enough data points. But it made me feel good.??

Hotel Dwaraka

In its earlier sit-down avatar on Bull Temple Road, it was known for doling out copious quantities of chutney in buckets. No sooner had you emptied half the chutney on your plate, a waiter would materialize and pour a bucket of the stuff into your plate. The main item on the menu here was the “khali dosa” (not to be confused with “plain dosa”). No sambar no palya no saagu. Just enormous quantities of chutney.

Continue reading “Hotel Dwaraka”

Zoning with respect to the new airport

Now that the airport has been successfully moved, despite the vehement protests from the powerful IT-BT-ITES lobby and various others, the next fear is that these companies will move close to the new airport. As it stands now, I’m not sure how the NH7 and other roads that lead to the new airport are going to deal with the increased traffic. If you add to this traffic generated due to commercial space in the same direction, things can get really bad indeed.

Continue reading “Zoning with respect to the new airport”

Regarding the second Bangalore Photowalk

I must confess I didn’t do a very good job yesterday when I announced the second Bangalore Photowalk. I was listening to a podcast while I was writing it, so I was a bit distracted. Just to confirm the salient features:

  • The walk will happen on 1st June 2008 between Ravindra Kalakshetra and the erstwhile Central Jail
  • We begin at 7:30 am sharp – it’s a slightly longish route and there are too many things worth photographing on the route so I think we should start early
  • From what I see, I think it’ll be a building-oriented walk. Lots of good buildings in the route
  • Some of the buildings that we’ll see during the walk
    • Ravindra Kalakshetra
    • Sir Puttannachetty Town Hall
    • The LIC Building
    • The Corporation Building
    • Bux-Ranka house
    • Hudson Church
    • YMCA
    • RBI (though I’m not sure if it’s safe to photograph it)
    • Daly Hall
    • UVCE
    • Central Jail
  • We should end the walk by around 10 am near the Central Jail, following which we will proceed to Kamat Yatri Nivas for breakfast
  • All are welcome. You are welcome even if you don’t carry a camera and are just interested in walking along with us on a nice Sunday morning. Of course you should be prepared to walk
  • I’m not sure of parking facilities around the Ravindra Kalakshetra. The nearest bus stop is Town Hall, to where you should get buses from all over the city
  • As usual, you don’t need to pay anything. Except for the breakfast of course.
  • I would advise you to carry a cap, a water bottle and a camera. I would also advise you to wear comfortable footwear.
  • There is a yahoo group I’ve started. it’s called blorephotowalk. Join. I need to approve your membership though
  • I request you to give more publicity for this walk. On your blog or website or maybe even in some papers or something 😛 .
  • RSVP. Either leave a comment here (with your name) or mail me at skthewimp[at]yahoo[dot]com
  • The latest issue of Bengaluru pages, and citizen matters have carried reviews of the first walk.