Dirt Strips on Our Roads

If you have recently been to one of European or North American countries and land back in Bangalore, the difference in the nature of the traffic is too stark to miss. There, it glides; here, it crawls. There are so many reasons for this. Here are some I can think of:

• There are simply too many vehicles and people in India
• Bad roads, i.e. potholes, uneven road width etc.
• Bad driving
• Lack of useful footpaths causing pedestrians to spill into the thoroughfare
• Hawker carts, taxis and vehicles parked within the edge of the road
• Commercial establishments built too close to the road
• Bad town planning which causes bottlenecks, e.g. ill-planned distribution of human establishments creating hotspots
• Bad traffic management

Many of the above are very difficult problems. We can't do much about our population. Most of the above need major replanning of cities, educating large multitudes of people about traffic sense, setting up surveillance and punitive structures and so on. This is very costly, and if at all possible in India's case, would take years to happen.

Road Dust

This post is not about all the above hard problems. It's about a problem which seems to me a much easier one to solve. It's the dust that accumulates on the edges of our roads. See this:

The light brown strip running along the road is earth settled on the road. Its width is over a metre. I wouldn't be surprised if this accounts for approximately 1/6th of the total road width. This part of the road is unmotorable and un-bicyclable. In short, this part doesn't get used at all, not even by pedestrians. In presence of such traffic woes, this is a colossal wastage of precious road width. They further choke the already woeful traffic, causing delays and accidents. If you are on a two-wheeler or a bicycle, this part has less grip than the rest of the road, making it dangerous. For bicyclists, its unusable because its uneven and rough, making it harder to pedal on them. When it rains, this part becomes slippery making it further dangerous to venture on them. And this is a very common sight on Indian urban roads.

And to the best of my understanding, this problem is nowhere close to as hard as all the above listed problems. With one cleaning operation done, I presume, even in a very dusty environment, it would stay clean for weeks if not months. The benefits are immediate and immense. It would free up that much width of the road, making it faster and safer to ply on. There are these dust sweeping trucks available which municipalities and Gram Panchayats can procure. They can share or rent these if they can't afford to own one. They can contract the task out to private parties. My guess is this won't be all that expensive. They already do this routinely in some of richer areas already.

I am telling something every road user knows well. Often, we don't say such things because we think it's too obvious, or that the authorities don't have the will to do anything about it. This time, I thought, let me just put this out for exchange of thoughts, and possible notice of pertinent authorities. Maybe, it's obvious. But it doesn't hurt anyone saying it anyway.

I request authorities to take notice and take a step. Doing something about it is easy and inexpensive, I think. One more thought (relevant to World Environment Day today). Please remove the dust off these roads and mark that part as cycling tracks. 🚴🚴🚴Automobile drivers are anyway not using this part in many places.