Getting BRT to work

Dedicated bus lanes are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for BRT

After significant success in Ahmedabad and spectacular failure in Delhi, Pune is the latest city in India to embark on a “Bus Rapid Transport” (BRT) project. As the name suggests, the point of a BRT is to provide fast and convenient transport to people on buses that ply on existing roads, with some sections of some roads being reserved for buses.

However, in popular imagination, BRT has become synonymous with bus lanes (a lane of road reserved for buses), and the whole controversy in Delhi (which caused the project to be shelved) was about a lane of an arterial road being reserved for buses. In fact, however, a dedicated bus lane is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for implementation of BRT.

The attraction of BRT is that it comes with low infrastructure cost – unlike a train or monorail (or even a tram) line, there is not much investment required in terms of physical infrastructure. The challenge with BRT, however, is that its buses are liable to get stuck in traffic (just like every other vehicle) which might prevent it from living up to its middle name.

For this reason, certain changes are made to traffic patterns so that BRT indeed remains rapid. For example, traffic signals on arterial bus routes might be designed to give priority to the directions where buses travel. You might have bus stops in the middle of the road for people to get on to buses. And you might reserve lanes on roads for buses. Once again note that the last named is not a necessary condition for BRT.

What BRT should deliver is a dense and reliable network of buses. On arterial and other key roads, frequency of buses should be extremely high. Our current model of point-to-point and hub-and-spoke based bus routes need to be given up in favour of a more dense network, where it might be quicker for people to change multiple buses to get to their destination. This also warrants a change in the ticketing system, using a zone-based ticket than the current point-to-point ticket, and moving ticketing offline.

 

The fashion so far in India (with Ahmedabad being a possible exception) is to announce arterial roads as “BRT corridors” and start off the BRT services by reserving lanes on these roads for buses, without bothering about linkages and networks at either end. The problem with this is that the losers of the road space “pay” immediately, but the benefits of BRT are not immediately forthcoming.

A better method of implementation would be to make reservation of bus lanes the last step in BRT. The first should be to increase the density of buses and creation of networks. The problem with this is that it requires investment and the expanded (and densified) network might run far below capacity for a while. Yet, as the network expands (even without dedicated lanes), people will begin to see the benefits and convenience offered, and demand for BRT will increase.

Two things will happen – firstly, the expanded and densified network of buses will start crowding out (literally) private vehicles on the road. Secondly, people will see the relative benefits of taking these buses and these buses will start filling up. As these two effects take place, there will come a point when lanes can be reserved for buses without slowing down any of the rest of the traffic.

What we need, in other words, is “system thinking“, and to look at BRT as a solution to move people to their destination in a more efficient manner. Once policymakers recognise that bus lanes are only a means to this end, we can expect BRT to implemented in a proper fashion.

My tryst with Kannada media

So about a month or so back, I wrote up an essay on why the much-maligned TenderSURE project is a right step in the development of Bangalore, and why the Chief Minister’s comments on the issue were misguided and wrong.

Having written it, considering it worthy of a better forum than NED, I shared it with my Takshashila colleagues. They opined that is should get published in a Kannada newspaper, and Varun Shenoy duly translated the piece into Kannada. And then the story began.

We sent it to PrajaVani (which has published several other Op-Eds from other Takshashila people), but they summarily rejected this without giving reasons. We then sent it to UdayaVani, reaching it after passing some hoops, but then they raised some questions with the content, the answers to which had been made quite clear within the text.

I think Mint has spoilt me, in that I assume that it’s okay to write geeky stuff and have it accepted for publication. Rather, it is possible that they’ve recruited me so that they can further bolster their geek quotient. Last week, for example, I sent a piece on Fractional Brownian Motion, and it got published. A couple of years back I’d sent a formula with Tchebyshev’s inequality to be included in a piece on sampling, and they had published that too.

When translating my piece, Varun thought it was too geeky and technical, and he made an attempt to tone it down during his translation. And the translation wasn’t easy – for we had to find Kannada equivalents for some technical terms that I’d used. In some cases, Varun expertly found terms. In others, we simply toned it down.

Having toned down the piece and made an effort to make it “accessible”, UdayaVani’s response was a bit of a dampener for us – and it resulted in a severe bout of NED. And so we sat on the piece. And continued to put NED.

Finally, Varun got out of it and published it on the Takshashila blog (!!). The original piece I’d written is here:

A feature of Bangalore traffic, given the nature of the road network, is that bottlenecks are usually at the intersections, and not at the roads. As a consequence, irrespective of how much we widen the roads, the intersections will continue to constrain the flow of traffic in the city. In other words, making roads narrower will not have a material impact on the throughput of traffic in the city.

And Varun’s translation is here:

(Update: I tried to extract Varun’s piece here but it’s not rendering properly, so please click through and read on the Logos blog)

Read the whole thing, whichever piece you can understand. I think we are on to something here.

And on that note, it might make sense to do a more rigorous network-level analysis of Bangalore’s roads. Designing the graph is simple – each intersection (however small it might be) is a node, each “road segment” is an edge. The graph is both directed (to take care of one-ways) and weighted (to indicate width of roads).

We’ll need data on flows, though. If we can get comprehensive data of origin and destination of a large number of people, we should be able to impute flows in each segment based on that.

And then we can rigorously test the hypothesis (I admit that it’s still only a hypothesis) that bottlenecks on Bangalore’s roads are intersections and not roads.

The Box: A review

So over the weekend I started and finished reading “The Box: How the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger” by Mark Levinson. It’s a fascinating book, and one that I had been intending to read for a very long time. Somehow it always kept slipping my mind whenever I wondered what book to buy next, and I’d pushed buying it for a long time now.

Finally, a few days back, when “unknown twitter celebrityKrish Ashok asked his followers to send him reading recommendations, and when he published the list, and I saw this book on the list, and I saw that the book was available on Kindle for Rs. 175, I just bought it. This is the first book in a very long time that I’ve bought “straight” off the Kindle Store, not bothering with a sample.

It’s a fascinating book, as it takes us through the 50-odd years of history of the shipping box. And on the way, it gives us insights into the development of the world economy through the 50s and 60s, and factors that led to the logistic revolution ushered in by the box.

We think of post world war America as this capitalist haven, where markets were free, and you could get jailed for communist leanings. We tend to think about this time as one of innovation and freedom of business, leading to high economic growth.

This wasn’t the case, though. While the US was nominally capitalist and markets were supposedly free, this was a time of heavy regulations, and the presence of cartels. International shipping rates, for example, till the mid-1970s, were set by “conferences” (basically cartels), after which the cartels broke down. It was not possible for a carrier to quote an integrated source-to-destination rate, and rates had to be quoted by leg. Someone who wanted to start a new train route had to prove to the regulators that it would not harm existing players!

And then there were the unions. Levinson devotes an entire chapter to how the unions were managed. Basically containerisation meant greater mechanisation and a reduction in demand for labour. And this was obviously not acceptable to the dockworker unions, and led to protracted battles which needed to be resolved before containerisation could take off. The most interesting story came from the UK, where unions in most established ports (primarily London and Liverpool) blocked containerisation, and went on strike in the specially developed container port at Tilbury. Felixstowe, which had hitherto been too obscure a port to attract unions’ attention, now unencumbered by unions, jumped on to the container business and is now by far the UK’s biggest port.

Levinson also pays much attention to how the container shaped economies in general. Prior to containerisation, the cost of changing mode of transport was very high, since individual items needed to be unloaded from one means of transport and loaded to another. Industries were usually located based on access to port, and ports came up to service nearby industries. Containerisation changed all that. Now that it was easy to transport using a series of different means of transport, the location advantage of being close to port was lost. And this had massive effects on the economy of regions.

Massive effects on economies also happened due to the scale factor that containerisation brought in. Small ports didn’t make any sense any more, since the transaction cost of berthing was too high. And so small ports started dying, with business being soncolidated into a few larger ports. The game changed into a winner take all mechanism.

In the 1950s and 60s, before the coming of the container, shipping was a low-capex high-opex (operational expenditure) business. Most ships were old and cheap, but costs in terms of labour and other things was high. With the coming of the containership, the cost structure inverted, with the capital expenditure now being extremely high, but opex being quite low. This led to “revenue management”, and a drop in prices, and ultimately the breaking of the cartels.

The book is full of insights, and chapters are organised by subject rather than in chronological order. It gets a little repetitive at times, but is mostly crisp (I read it in a weekend), and the insights mentioned above are only a sample. And it tells us not only the story of the box (which it does) but also the story of the world economy, and regulation, and competition, and unionisation and economies of scale. Highly recommended.

 

How 2ab explains net neutrality

I’ve temporarily resurrected my blog on the Indian National Interest, and this post is mirrored from there. This is a serious argument, btw. After a prolonged discussion at Takshashila this morning, I convinced myself that net neutrality is a good idea.

So Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set off this little storm on Twitter by talking about the relationship between India and Canada being similar to the “2ab term” in the expansion of (a+b)^2 .

Essentially, Modi was trying to communicate that the whole of the relationship between India and Canada is greater than the sum of parts, and it can be argued that the lack of a “cos \theta” term there implies that he thinks India and Canada’s interests are perfectly aligned (assuming a vector sum).

But that is for another day, for this post is about net neutrality. So how does 2ab explain net neutrality? The fundamental principle of the utility of the Internet is Metcalfe’s law which states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of entities in the network. In other words, if a network has n entities, the value of these n entities being connected is given by the formula k n^2 . We can choose the unit in which we express utility such that we can set k = 1, which means that the value of the network is n^2.

Now, the problem with not having net neutrality is that it can divide the internet into a set of “walled gardens”. If your internet service provider charges you differentially to access different sites, then you are likely to use more of the sites that are cheaper and less of the more expensive sites. Now, if different internet service providers will charge different websites and apps differently, then it is reasonable assume that the sites that customers of different internet services access are going to be different?

Let us take this to an extreme, and to the hypothetical case where there are two internet service providers, and they are not compatible with each other, in that the network that you can access through one of these providers is completely disjoint from the network that you can access through the other provider (this is a thought experiment and an extreme hypothetical case). Effectively, we can think of them as being two “separate internets” (since they don’t “talk to” each other at all).

Now, let us assume that there are a users on the first internet, and b users on the second (this is bad nomenclature according to mathematical convention, where a and b are not used for integer variables, but there is a specific purpose here, as we can see). What is the total value of the internet(s)?

Based on the formula described earlier in the post, given that these two internets are independent, the total value is a^2 + b^2. Now, if we were to tear down the walls, and combine the two internets into one, what will be the total value? Now that we have one network of (a+b) users, the value of the network is (a+b)^2 or a^2 + 2 ab + b^2 . So what is the additional benefit that we can get by imposing net neutrality, which means that we will have one internet? 2 ab, of course!

In other words, while allowing internet service providers to charge users based on specific services might lead to additional private benefits to both the providers (higher fees) and users (higher quality of service), it results in turning the internet into some kind of a walled garden, where the aggregate value of the internet itself is diminished, as explained above. Hence, while differential pricing (based on service) might be locally optimal (at the level of the individual user or internet service provider), it is suboptimal at the aggregate level, and has significant negative externalities.

#thatswhy we need net neutrality.

Why Google, Facebook, etc. are against Net Neutrality in India

I’ve been out of country for close to a month now, so haven’t really been following India news too closely (apart from via social media). But from my (biased 🙂 ) sources I understand that TRAI has put out a discussion paper in which they want to permit telecom companies to charge you based on the service that you use, thus violating Net Neutrality.

Now I’m yet to take a stand on this (this argument by Tim Harford against Net Neutrality is rather compelling, making me believe that well implemented competition regulations can mean we can make do without Net Neutrality, but I haven’t given it too much thought yet), but I have an idea as to why the likes of Google and Facebook, which in the past and in other geographies have come out strongly in favour of Net Neutrality, are okay with Net Neutrality violation in India.

The basic issue in India is with “over the top” services such as WhatsApp and Viber which the likes of Airtel and Vodafone see as a threat for it competes with their rather lucrative voice and SMS business. I’ve mentioned in the past that there’s a quality issue here which the telecom companies can differentiate on (packet switching doesn’t work that well for voice), but given costs it is hard to make a compelling case for using circuit switching for international calls.

So the likes of Airtel and Vodafone are threatened by such services and want to charge users more for using WhatsApp and Viber compared to other applications. Net Neutrality supporters, who argue that internet infrastructure should just be a set of neutral pipes (rather than a “two-sided platform”, as Harford argues), argue that this is unfair, and that Airtel and Vodafone are exploiting their positions as gatekeepers (literally) to defend their own related business.

Coming to the point of this post, entities such as Google and Facebook are coming out on the “wrong” side of the net neutrality debate here in India, arguing that internet companies should be looked at as two-sided platform markets rather than neutral pipes (resisted the urge to use the phrase “information superhighway” there!). Considering that they’re proponents of Net Neutrality elsewhere, why are they taking this stance in India?

Assuming that final regulations come out in favour of net neutrality (treating internet as infrastructure, and not a platform), how should the likes of Airtel and Vodafone react? Clearly their data business is cannibalising their voice business, so they should logically increase their prices for data plans (no brainer). Given that they will not be allowed (in this situation) to charge differential rates based on the service, they will have to uniformly jack up data rates.

This can be troublesome for Google and Facebook on two counts. Firstly, the telecom providers may not get their pricing right, and rather than having a ramp (charging heavy users heavily, since only such people will be using WhatsApp or Viber), they might increase data rates across the board. This will result in a drop in mobile internet penetration (one reason it’s so high now is that it’s cheap), and considering that Google and Facebook are services that pretty much every who uses the internet in India uses, it will result in loss of user base, traffic and revenue (possibly) for them.

The second problem is that even if telecom operators get their pricing right (maintain current pricing for basic plans, but jack up rates for high data usage) it spells trouble for Google and Facebook. One of Google’s widely used services is the video streaming application Youtube, and Youtube consumes high bandwidth. Facebook is getting into native video in a big way, and it is estimated that it might be more successful than Youtube in terms of advertising. And with correct internet pricing under net neutrality, demand for services such as Youtube and Facebook Video will go down significantly, which is not good for those services.

So the simple answer is that the reason Google and Facebook are coming out against Net Neutrality is that they are coming out on the right side of the new proposed (anti neutrality) regulations. Like WhatsApp and Viber, they too are high bandwidth applications, but unlike WhatsApp or Viber they don’t compete directly with the owners of the pipes. Thus, they want providers to have the ability to impose differential pricing, since that will mean that subscribers can access their content for cheaper, and this allows them to make more advertising revenues.

In my view (again note that I’m yet to take a stand on this net neutrality business), this move by Google and Facebook to support the anti-neutrality regulations is extremely short-sighted since it can hit them back at a later point in time. There is no guarantee that in the long term their services will not compete with that of telecom providers (Hangouts? Facebook voice calling?) and the regulations that they are currently supporting can come back to hit them at a later point in time.

It seems that Google and Facebook are working on an assumption that there will not be other high-bandwidth applications that will compete less with pipe-owners (telecom operators) than them (Google & Facebook). They are very likely to be in for a surprise, and end up as the cranes in this Panchatantra story.

Lizsting it in an airport warehouse

I had a rather bizarre experience at the Lizst Ferenc Airport in Budapest last evening. I boarded the plane from a warehouse. Really.

When it was announced at 7:25 pm that our 8:15 RyanAir to Barcelona would board from gate A18, we walked expectantly to the A side of the terminal, hoping to find our gate. All we found was this gate that said “A12-A18”, before accessing which there was boarding pass control. It seemed bizarre, but we assumed that we would be taking a bus to another terminal to board, got our passes scanned and walked on.

There was going to be no bus. There was another terminal to board from, however, but it was a warehouse. Literally. Here’s what it looked like (pictures from wife’s iPhone):

IMG_0298 IMG_0299

 

That’s right. We were indeed in a large warehouse-like temporary structure constructed out of tin or asbestos or some such material. A rather ingenious way to extend the airport.

This warehouse had eight marked entrances (A12 to A19) and eight marked exits (respectively). At the entrance of each entrance there was another level of boarding pass checking (along with passport), after which we were let in to the queue to board. And this was where RyanAir separated out its “regular” customers from those that had paid for priority boarding (who were put in another “bin” (no better word for that) ).

Ours was not the only flight boarding at that time (though you can see that one side of the warehouse – A12 to A17 was completely empty). A Hungarian low-cost carrier called WizzAir was boarding its flight to Milan from A19 at the same time. And it again looked like a bus stand. Long snaking lines of passengers who had gone past the boarding pass check waiting to board.

Low cost airlines sometimes try to save on airport costs by using secondary airports in several cities. For example, in London, they use airports such as Stansted and Luton, and in Paris they use Orly. But some cities don’t have a well functioning secondary airport so even low-cost airlines are forced to use the primary airport. This “extension” of the Budapest airport as used by the likes of RyanAir and WizzAir is simply bizarre, though!

Anyway, presently a stewardess appeared and opened the exit door for A18 (this was after A19 had been opened and the Milan passengers sent on their way). We walked out through carefully marked barricades, and saw a RyanAir plane in front of us. And we walked through the barricades until we were stopped a few metres before the plane (the line had been orderly so far, and would remain so).

We remained there for a few minutes as they presumably cleaned up the aircraft in that time. I think the reason we had been moved from the warehouse to this queue was so that more space could be created in the warehouse so that boarding passes of all passengers could be checked in this time. The use of so many “buffers” (or “chambers” if you were to draw a sewerage analogy) was quite interesting in terms of RyanAir’s queue management (the wife has promised a more technical blog post on this). Anyway, here’s what this queue looked like after we had exited the warehouse:

IMG_0301 IMG_0300

Soon the final barricades opened and we were allowed to board the aircraft (both doors of the aircraft were open). There was a bit of inefficiency here since people approaching the wrong door ended up slowing the boarding process (there were some people in rows 31 and 32 who boarded from front creating a massive traffic jam), but the boarding was concluded soon enough (all previous bottlenecks having been removed, and the flight took off on time!

It was a rather bizarre experience, and the first time I had boarded in such a large airport without using either an aerobridge or a bus. And I don’t know if this is a temporary arrangement in Budapest as they either expand the airport or reopen Terminal 1, or if this is how things are supposed to be in the long term. And I’m amazed that this kind of jugaad was first implemented in Europe rather than in India.

 

Apartments and mixed zoning

So, as Udupa put it, I went to Barcelona “on a study trip like a corporator”, came back and wrote one piece on urban planning in Barcelona and what India can learn about it. The piece is in Pragati. An excerpt:

That said, there are important lessons to be learnt for India from E’ixample. Most current models for urban development take after the sprawl-heavy automobile-intensive US model. What is important to make the new “smart cities” effective is to move away from this model to a more dense public transport focussed “European model”. And from this perspective, the new cities could do worse than looking to Barcelona’s E’ixample for inspiration.

Read the whole thing. Anyway, so I talk about two features of E’ixample (the district in Barcelona where the wife lives, and hence where I spent most time during my trip last October) in the Pragati piece, and mention that they’re useful concepts that India should adapt for its “smart cities” program – mixed zoning and apartments.

The former, I argue, ensures that there are “eyes on the street” at different points in time. This helps keep the crime rate low (deserted streets and lack of pedestrian movement usually make it more conducive for criminals), and provides a safe atmosphere. The latter ensures good efficient land use and allows for provision for large roads and open spaces without compromising on total density. And as I realised this evening, the two concepts (apartments and mixed zoning) are not independent.

One of the reasons that people offer for strict zoning (keeping residential and business areas disjoint) is that they don’t want random people hanging out in front of their residences. Random people hanging out in front of your house makes you feel unsafe, and a bit weird, and if there is a shop or a restaurant next door, the chances of this happening are rather high. For example, recently the Bangalore Mirror wrote about a “controversy” regarding the opening of a cafe in a residential area in Koramangala. Neighbours don’t like such cafes as it will lead to people hanging out in front of their homes, and that gives a sense of violation of space.

So what makes apartments and mixed zoning go together? When you live “high up” in a mid or high-rise building which you share with many other people, your sense of ownership of the space in front of your house is lower. If someone is “loitering” in front of your house, you are less concerned because 1. you are farther away from the “action” and 2. you don’t feel a sense of violation of your space. Thus, being in an apartment makes it more palatable for you that there are shops and restaurants and offices close to your house.

Now, everyone likes shops and restaurants close to home, but in case of single-unit homes, people are likely to adopt a “NIMFY” (not in my front yard) attitude towards these – for they might violate your space. Apartments help address this conflict!

Hence apartments and mixed zoning go hand in hand, and both need to be encouraged. Note, however, that I’m not proposing Brigade Gateway as the ideal model for urban development!

Bangalore airport has become horrible

image

Flying domestic after a really long time. The last time I did was back in august. And the Bangalore airport seems to have become horrible in the meantime.

Check out the picture. Gates so close together and hardly any seats for passengers to wait on. Now it’s well known that most domestic flights have 150-180 seats. How hard is it to design waiting areas to seat so many people per flight?

And the Bangalore airport has just been expanded and it’s so congested. Talk about continuing to underestimate growth!

The only hope is that this is a temporary arrangement and once the expansion is complete we’ll have better waiting space.

Red bus

No, not that red bus. I’m talking about the red BMTC buses in Bangalore. They used to be red till 1998 or 1999, and then the government of the day decided that the buses were due an image change (red being danger and all that). This coincided with the spinning off of the BMTC from the erstwhile BTS (which was part of the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation). The buses were all painted blue.

Over the years, new kinds of services have been launched. There was the Pushpak – coloured beige. Then there was the slightly premium Suvarna, coloured a very light purple. And then there were the pass-only green buses, women only pink buses (yes, really) and the red Volvos. For some reason, red buses have started making a comeback to mainline BMTC routes, though I don’t quite know the reason for the reintroduction of the colour, or if they are any different from the blue and white buses.

So for the first time in fifteen years or so, I rode a “normal” red BMTC bus today (in the intervening period I either rode “normal” blue and white buses or premium Volvo red buses). Some pertinent observations from this rather momentous (!!) journey.

I was close to Shivajinagar, and had to come home to Jayanagar. Considering that it’s a pain haggling with auto rickshaw drivers in that area, I decided to take a bus (especially since I was coming from a place really close to the bus stand). I quickly walked up to the Shivajinagar TTMC (“travel and transit management centre” or something). The footpath on the St Marks Road extension on which I walked was quite poor – I hope the TenderSure project that is rebuilding roads and footpaths in the middle of the city reaches there soon.

Even navigation within the TTMC is quite bad – it’s badly designed in the sense that there’s no space to walk where you have no chance of being hit by one of the hundreds of buses there. A helpful official told me where I would get the bus to Jayanagar, but to get there (walking fast) was quite a challenge. Finally I got there and found a red 27E (going to JP Nagar) and hopped on.

The BMTC is definitely not cheap – the journey set me back by 19 rupees (to put that in context, I had traveled there in the morning by auto rickshaw and paid Rs 86). It’s definitely been a long time since I’ve traveled by bus as I handed the conductor a ten rupee note and looked expectedly for change. I had to shell out another ten bucks.

I didn’t get a seat but found a comfortable place for myself to stand (right at the back of the bus). The concept of having the door in the middle of the bus rather than at the fag end is a good one – it allows you to go deep into the bus and find good places to stand. Also, you are looking ahead while standing and can look out for any shuffling in the seats which might potentially get empty!

What I noticed during my journey (which took 25 minutes which is not bad at all for that time of the day) is that each of these longish distance buses actually serve several small markets – if we can figure out a metric for how many times the passengers in the bus “churn”  (it’s not too hard, just feeling lazy right now) it might help us plan routes better in terms of multiple short routes rather than a few long routes (that can help cut down uncertainty in timings, etc.).

So the bus for example completely emptied itself out at the Shantinagar TTMC (which is a very good TTMC IMHO, since no buses terminate there), and then got refilled a couple of stops later in Wilson Garden. Earlier, there had been massive churn near Richmond Circle. And so on.

This is perhaps related to the cost but there seemed to be a very different demographic that populated the bus (based on looks – I’m being judgmental and all that, I know) compared to the type 15 years back. In terms of social strata the bus seemed much less diverse today than 15 years back, and it worked both ways. It seemed like most bus travellers today could be broadly defined as being lower middle class – I hardly saw any labourer types (might be a function of the route also) or too many upper middle class types in the bus. It is interesting how these things change!

The Crow’s Designs

As I had mentioned in my blog post yesterday, I just finished reading Sanjeev Sanyal’s Land of seven rivers yesterday afternoon. And later in the evening I started reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Anti-fragile. And before you wonder, let me tell you that yesterday was a working day for me. Just that I had a long process running which gave me the flexibility to catch up on my reading.

So one topic that was mentioned both towards the end of Sanyal’s book and in the prologue of Taleb’s book was the issue of urban planning. And interestingly, the two agreed. In the prologue of Anti-fragile, Taleb has listed out a series of “fragile”, “robust” and “anti-fragile” systems. He has classified it by subject, and in each subject he gives us examples of the three systems. Being halfway through the first chapter, I understand that he is going to elaborate on each member of the list later on in his book, but I’m yet to reach the chapter (I’m still in chapter one, I told you) where he talks about urban planning. Yet, what he has written in that table in the preface on this chapter caught my eye. More so, given that it agreed with what Sanyal had written in his book. In the row on “urbanism”, Taleb has simply written “Le Corbusier” in the Fragile column and “Jane Jacobs” in the Anti-fragile column (the preface of the book is available on Taleb’s website. The relevant section of the table is on page 27).

In the last chapter of Land of seven rivers Sanyal talks about post-independence events that has affected the geography of India. One topic that he delves into is urban planning, where he contrasts the sterility of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh with the dynamism of unplanned Gurgaon. He mentions that despite careful planning, little economic value has been created in the city of Chandigarh itself, and one reason why it is supposedly clean is because there exist no space for the poor within the city! The city’s rigid master plan is actually a hindrance to economic activity as it allows for little space for entrepreneurial activity to take place. So whatever growth and innovation Chandigarh has seen, says Sanyal, has actually happened in its suburb of Mohali, which is in the state of Punjab.

Urban planning is a topic that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit in recent times, as I’m trying to figure out where to buy a house and “settle down”. Having examined several of Bangalore’s neighbourhoods, I’ve found a strong contrast between planned and unplanned neighbourhoods. The former (eg. Jayanagar) usually have wide roads, pavements, access to markets at frequent intervals (one thing where planning has failed, and for the good I think, is zoning. I wouldn’t want to walk to the main market for every one of my needs) and auto rickshaws. More importantly, they have people walking around on the streets all the time, which makes the neighbourhood safe. Unplanned neighbourhoods (eg. Sarjapur Road) usually have large condominiums, few shopping options and no auto rickshaws. You have either highways or small village roads and not too many people walk around. This makes the streets unsafe and makes you reliant on private transport, which in my opinion is not a good thing. Nevertheless, one must admit that given the massive influx into Bangalore in the last 10-12 years (on account of the IT boom), it is the unplanned neighbourhoods that have taken the lion’s share of housing the incoming population.

So the question is how much planning a city needs. Too much planning (as in Chandigarh and Delhi) can make the cities static, and not provide enough for potential immigration – which is necessary for increased economic activity. On the other hand, unplanned areas are inherently unsafe and don’t provide for a great urban quality of life (as far as I’m concerned one of the primary indicators of urbanism is public transport). Is there a middle ground of “light touch regulation” which derives the best of both worlds? How should urban planners approach this issue? How can we make our cities both dynamic and safe? As of now, I don’t have the answers.

PS: The title of this post is in reference to the name “Le Corbusier” which is French for “The Crow”.