This years rains have come and maybe almost gone and they have taken the roads with them. Majority of the roads have now been revisited by the pot holes and flooding due to rain is almost passe. With the "Namma Metro" taking its time in coming and being limited in nature, at least to start with, I think Bangalore should start thinking of solutions for the next wave of traffic troubles. Its unlikely that our metro will have the reach like the famous Paris or London metros, and hence we need more alternate mass transit system.
I have heard Narayana Murthy talk of mono rail and here is an example of it in action in Sydney. Look at the support pillars, they don't seem to occupy much space and the rail seems to fit into the narrowest of roads.
pics courtesy wikipedia
I know there is plan of some kinda mono rail for Bangalore, but I think we will need a lot more like these planned and done so very soon.
2 comments:
Ajay,
As hopeful you sound there are some disadvantages with monorail like
* Monorail vehicles are not compatible with any other type of rail infrastructure, which makes (for example) through services onto mainline tracks impossible.
Which means you cannot build a scalable solution
* In an emergency, passengers may not be able to immediately exit because the monorail vehicle is high above ground and not all systems have emergency walkways. The passengers must sometimes wait until a rescue train, fire engine or a cherry picker comes to the rescue. Newer monorail systems resolve this by building emergency walkways alongside the entire track, at the expense of visual intrusion. Suspended railways resolve this by building aircraft style evacuation slides into the vehicles. Japanese systems use the next train to tow broken down trains to the next station, but this has yet to occur.
I agree I witnessed an accident in Seattle where folks were just trapped and we are all underneath unable to do anything until Rescue came in , most of folks inhaled a lot of smoke , more than fire causing problem , lots of people injured by inhaling themselves with smoke
* Turnouts, especially high speed ones tend to be difficult. Traversers might be substituted.
Source: Wikipedia, with my comments :)
Right now, I am ready for an imperfect solution right now than no solution. :-)
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