CROSS ROADS

The Biggest Pain for Urban Residents
- By Swati Ramanathan

It caught us unaware, a breath-taking structure of sweeping inter-connected steel trusses, bare and exposed without its skin, a work-in-progress, like a giant architect's model. While the government machinery is busy be-decking the entire city, Beijing's Birds' Nest Olympic stadium, is the undoubted star of the 2008 games. I don't favour some of the planning choices that the Chinese government has made in designing their cities, but they have got the architecture of this one right - an indigenous cultural metaphor, inspiring and modern. I was once again over-whelmed by the size and scale of what the Chinese had built in their cities. Unlike Shanghai, which seems to have been ripped out and replaced by modernity, Beijing has a mix of old and new, sometimes struggling to co-exist in harmony. Rather like its residents' struggle with the English language.

Over the past ten days, we have visited three cities and one city-state - Beijing, Dalian, Hong Kong and Singapore. In all of these, thoughtful urban planning and urban design have created high quality public spaces and amenities. Beijing has six ring roads around the city and we frequented a six-lane spoke that connects the financial business district to these rings. I was disconcerted to find that this spoke was built thirty years ago, betraying an uncanny early vision. In Dalian too, the wide boulevards were laid many years ago.  Singapore planned their transport and connectivity in a strategic plan laid out 25 years ago. Land was earmarked for growth and infrastructure according to the strategic plan. Hong Kong has an enviable multi modal and completely integrated system of transport - underground subway, surface tram, bus, mini bus, feeder bus and ferry. The authorities of these cities displayed admirable planning prescience in these cities years ago.

India's cities by contrast, lack the most basic elements of good planning. Part of the problem is that most government agencies and citizens are unaware of the critical role that spatial planning plays in addressing the quality of their lives. At the centre of many of the challenges that our cities and towns face is the issue of how we plan our urban land, or more generally SPACE.

Planning urban SPACE relates to almost every aspect of what works and what doesn't work in our cities  - from complex systems of comprehensive public transport to examining whether neighbourhoods are porous and well connected or stuck in bottle-necks and dead-ends. Take another example of our garbage management systems - a city generates half a tonne of garbage per capita per day. By this estimate any big city with a population of 5 million generates about 2500 tonnes of garbage per day, and much of this suffers from ineffective methods of disposal. Locating appropriate landfills is an example of urban planning that aids an urban governance issue. Yet another example is of planning for cities to prevent depleting ground water such that natural aquifers are nurtured and the surrounding areas made into catchments that collect rainwater and recharge ground water.

We have over 4000 cities and towns in the country.  Remarkably, only 150 of these produce master plans.  Even these few that do produce master plans take a drafting-table approach to planning - of simplistic zoning and land use.

The damaging consequences of the absence of quality spatial planning are all around us, and yet most of us are unaware of the role that urban planning plays on our quality of life. Clearly therefore, in order for people to demand better planning, the average resident and urban administrator must first understand the impact of urban planning in ways that he or she can immediately connect with.

We need an urban planning "mascot" - a compelling illustration of urban planning that meaningfully impacts people's lives by solving an everyday urban irritant. Such a "planning lighthouse" can become a representative icon of planning that helps improve the quality of urban life and will catalyse the demand for better urban planning.

But do we have such a candidate? I believe we do - in the hundreds of road intersections that clog our cities.  These urban cross-roads are the ideal "planning problem" candidate.

Cross roads - or intersections - are one of the biggest pain points for all urban residents - the rich the poor, the motorist the pedestrian, the young the old. These cross-roads are a microcosm of the chaos due to poor city planning and urban design. Let me take one example: the cross-road I confront multiple times a day, as an illustrative example - Ramaiah Hospital cross-road in north Bangalore.

Everything about the cross-road is wrong: buildings crowd the corners of the intersection, trees and their roots jut onto the roads, stones from the road divider spill across both lanes, an entry / exit to the newly sanctioned hospital right on the main road close to the intersection creates jams, footpaths are jagged and of no use to pedestrians, unchecked two wheelers spring onto stretches of footpaths where-ever they are a little wider, while hapless pedestrians weave in and out of traffic to cross roads. Most distressing of all, traffic congestion ripples out in a domino, infecting the entire neighbouring road network of what should have been quiet residential neighbourhood lanes.

This scenario is repeated to a greater or lesser extent, in 99 percent of the major cross-roads in the big cities of India. Solving the cross-roads planning problem requires applying the twin disciples of urban planning and urban design.

Continuing the example of the Ramaiah cross-roads, how can the existing situation be improved? Consider an overview of the area around the junction. The two major roads intersecting at the crossroads traffic light are the New B.E.L. road and the 80' double road that links BEL road to the other major artery in the area - Sanjaynagar main road. The double road stops at the Ramaiah cross-road and becomes a private road inside Ramaiah.

In order to provide urban planning solutions, the starting point is with defining the problem. The three key issues that need addressing are the following:

Bottle-necks around the cross-roads:

The bottle-neck at the other end of the double road is due to an un-wieldy twist of the 80' road and its subsequent narrowing width. One single building blocks the continuation of the double road in a wider straighter line up to the Sanjaynagar road. This will release the congestion at that end and become an alternative route to the BEL road. Similarly, the main entrance / exit into Sanjaynagar from the Bellary Road, is a narrow little bottleneck that is backed up into a chaotic mess on a regular basis. All it takes is acquiring a little military land that is adjacent to this road, to widen the road and bring substantial relief.
Lack of porous neighbourhoods with few entries and exits onto main roads, increasing the pressure on the road at few points:

There are five major public institutions holding vast tracts of urban land in the area: the Indian Institute of Science, the Agricultural and Veterinary Institute, the Central Power and Research Institute, Ramaiah College and Hospital, and the Air Force land. Unlike campuses like Yale, Berkeley or even the White House in Washington, these institutes are walled and exclude the surrounding communities and effectively block internal and external connectivity and porosity of the entire area. Creating access through these institutions will make the neighbourhoods in the area porous and well-linked. The marked map highlights some possibilities.

Poor zoning and land use around the cross-roads intersection:

The zoning and land use around the Ramaiah cross-roads, currently seems to allow minimal building line set-backs, crowding around the corners and high-traffic commercial and retail activity. The result is claustrophobic roads and minimum footpaths, with increased traffic. There is a public toilet sitting incongruously on an island right at the cross-roads. All these are related to urban planning decisions.
A similar exercise on urban design could look at addressing the following: detailing the footpaths, protecting the trees, providing safe pedestrian crossings, having the correct radii for turning vehicles, designing the medians and islands, traffic signals and police circle design, etc.