Transport Challenged People in Bangalore

Sudhir Gota writes a very interesting & thought provoking post, Behind Bangalore’s Growth, A New Species Is Born: Transport Challenged People on The City Fix. An excerpt:

Bangalore’s urban sprawl was aided by the economic boom, during which income levels of certain industries skyrocketed. The rising income combined with long travel times, poor public transportation facilities and the glamor and hype generated by the automobile industry powered the vehicular boom on the roads. The government’s efforts to make the city more car-friendly had a boomerang effect with a virtual multiplication of private automobiles on the road. In fact, the motorization index nearly doubled from 178 in 1996 to 361 in 2006. Presently, private automobiles – two wheelers, cars, taxis etc. – make up nearly 88% of the vehicles on Bangalore’s streets. Yet that accounts for just 39% of trips. Thus it can be concluded that Bangalore has high congestion not because it lacks roads– a claim that advocates of road construction routinely make – but because there are so many private vehicles moving so few people.

And, his concluding statement is spot-on…

It’s time to start planning for people and not vehicles. Accessibility and not mobility should be the primary concern of the planners and government.

Here’s a paper that Sudhir Gota & Prashant Mutalik have published on a related topic: Congestion to Demotorisation – A paradigm shift for Bangalore (PDF).

Times of India’s now started a new initiative (I’m guessing, encouraged by the success of the ‘Lead India’ initiative): ‘Unlock Bangalore – Let’s put the bang back in Bangalore‘.

Why does Delhi have such wide roads?

Ok. This may be a case of too much “analysis-paralysis”, but let me risk it anyways…

On the scarcity & abundance insight at the TiE event that I posted about last…and this is assuming this theory were true (that Indians have traditionally been oriented towards scarcity more than abundance):

Further clarifying that theme, what is also widely accepted in India is the general “North Indian” and “South Indian” cultural divide (over the recent years, these have been redefined as the West-of-Kanpur and East-of-Kanpur divide).

While there are several generalizations & pre-conceived notions about these two categories, what I’m referring to specifically is the perception of North Indians (those from Delhi, even more so)  being “born-for-business”, people who show-off their wealth, “Live Life King Size” attitude. In other words — an orientation towards Abundance.

Whereas, most South Indians (like me) have been brought up & constantly reminded about how we aren’t “cut for business”…we are the “salaried class”. A majority of our earnings MUST go into savings (to be used only at the time of retirement). Not to show-off one’s wealth. If you got a good job, don’t tell your neighbours until you actually complete your first full week at the new job! And so on. In other words — an orientation towards Scarcity.

So, is it a coincidence that Delhi has the widest of roads and cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai are suffering with narrow roads that are getting narrower, by the day? Also, is it a coincidence that Delhi/Gurgaon seem to have the biggest (really BIG) malls in the country?

I know…this sounds crazy & outlandish at one level. It’s even hard to clearly articulate the innumerable cultural layers that are hidden in the above topic. Nevertheless, it’s just a theory. Who knows…it may actually be true?!

Event report (Understanding the Logic of Consumer India)

Here’s my post-event summarization & ramblings on last week’s TiE event, Understanding the Logic of Consumer India:

But, before that, a random observation during tea-break: Majority of the glasses that were used for drinking water, had around 20% of drinking water remaining in each of the glasses (sorry, wasn’t carrying my camera with me that day)! On the sustainability side, that’s around 20% of the drinking water that the five-star hotel buys going to a waste. And on the business side, the hotel is spending 20% more than they should be!

Anyways, onto the event notes:

• Thankfully it wasn’t a powerpoint-presentation oriented event. It was an informal, open discussion facilitated by Vinita Bali. The topics that were discussed ranged from…predictable questions like, why she wrote the book, “We’re like that only!”…to interesting debates around…do businesses (especially entrepreneurs, given the fact it was a TiE event) really need to understand what their consumers’ needs are before going-to-market (this question did become a strong point of discussion among several in the audience)…to how do you know whether “that” is really the consumer’s need…to how one should spend time observing consumers at the point-of-sale/usage…to whether Reliance has got their retail business model correct or not (?), etc.
• Scarcity & Abundance: I forget whether it was Vinita or Rama who made a very subtle, yet powerful & interesting point about how Indians are fundamentally oriented towards (or come from) scarcity rather than abundance. The context to this discussion was around the need for competition in the market, without which a business can pretty much do whatever it wishes (without taking into account consumers’ needs) and many times, get away with it.
  Vinita/Rama made the point that Indians have traditionally been shy of competition because there is a tendency to believe that, if there is competition, then one’s share of the pie is at stake. And that comes from the cultural background where Indians are so oriented towards scarcity rather than abundance…meaning, there’s this nagging worry/feeling that…what’s there, isn’t enough for everyone.
• Do businesses really need to understand consumer’s needs: A question was put forth about why businesses don’t want to, don’t like to spend too much time/effort/money on understanding the consumer’s needs. Several people had varied (also, weird) responses to that.
  My take (or hypothesis):
  1. Most of the folks who run businesses are usually the left-brain-thinking, logic-oriented folks. That doesn’t mean they don’t use their right-side at all…it’s probably relatively underutilized when it comes to making business decisions.
     And, why that’s significant is…understanding & decoding consumer’s needs, I think, requires a considerable amount of right-brain-thinking (in addition to the left-brain as well)….which they would much rather not deal with, because it seems to be so “hard to get”.
     And that’s probably why the general attitude towards end-user research has been of “Let’s-do-it-when-we-have-the-time-and-money”. Thankfully, not all clients think that way and people like me do end up putting our right-brain-thinking to good use.
  2. The other side of the coin: Researchers haven’t done a good (enough) job of translating research findings into tangible/measurable business recommendations or solutions. World-over, there seems to be (in my experience) an innate skepticism that research just ends up in a report that one files away, hardly ever to use one’s business decisions. So, researchers need to start talking business and the language of business to be able to really deliver the value that research often promises.
• While making a point during the discussion, one of the women in the audience talked about a conversation she once had with the store manager of one of the large (departmental/lifestyle) stores in Bangalore. The store manager said that only 40% of the store was allocated to women’s products and almost 60% was for men! The logic being that, women don’t actually buy as much as they spend so much time at the store!!!
• On a related note…and this I don’t recall so clearly…there was also a point about how some (traditional) business practices & approaches are so different in different parts of the world. In India, the conventional approach to pricing coffee would be to charge more for coffee with sugar (‘coz you’re having to spend on more sugar). But in the west, the practice is to charge more for diet drinks!
• Unlike most other TiE events (in Bangalore) that I’ve attended, this seemed to have the least participation from the techie crowd. There seemed to be several CEOs and heads of small-medium-enterprises in the crowd. Does it indicate the lack of interest among the techies about creating user-centered products & services? I guess that’s too harsh a conclusion to draw, but this phenomena didn’t seem like something to not make note of.
• The discussion (especially between the audience and the panelists) kept going back to the unresolved issue about connectivity to the new Bangalore airport that’s coming up in March 2008. One had to be there to experience the irritation, anger, frustration and complete resignation about the state of (infrastructure) affairs, surrounding the connectivity to the new airport.
  Of course, Rama did touch upon the fact that there are people who actually get to benefit from such poor connectivity or infrastructure, the cellphone companies to start with. If you aren’t getting to the airport on time or are even avoiding the travel, chances are you’re using the good ol’ phone to communicate with your business associates or your near & dear ones! Interesting.

Reading between the lanes…

Found this awesome advertising campaign on TheCityFix. Ads (including the below pictures) originally posted here.

With traffic jams becoming a harsh reality (nightmare?) of urban life, it would be interesting to explore what services could be offered to (at the very least) minimize the poor user experience for the commuters who’re stuck in never-ending traffic jams?

I’ve personally experienced that listening to the Radio/Music or catching up with friends/colleagues on the phone (while you’re stuck in a jam) are couple of ways of minimizing the stress. What keeps you going?

Moving to sustainable urban transport (and why we’ve moved our office hours)

Sustainable urban transport and urban mobility initiatives have always interested me. Thanks to a good friend who works at EMBARQ, and people like Ashwin Mahesh (who’s got a wealth of knowledge & experience in this domain), I’ve had the opportunity to learn more about it over the last year or so. But, an interesting conversation with a friend led to an idea that I feel holds a lot of possibilities in the context of urban mobility.

A good friend took up a job recently at Idea Product Design (interesting company, by the way, do check them out) in Ahmedabad and happened to mention that the work hours are from 6.30am to 3pm or so! Obviously, my first reaction was absolute shock!

Thankfully, better sense prevailed. And before I knew it, I was actually sold on the idea. To the extent that we’ve now changed our office hours (on a “trial” period to start with). We now start our day at 7am and are done by 4pm! Getting done early in the day and still having several hours left in the day, was one of the key motivators for all of us to try this out. But it’s also the urban mobility angle that’s been of interest for me personally.

Though I’ve heard about similar initiatives by some corporates in Bangalore to beat traffic, for some reason, I wasn’t sold on the idea earlier. But I can now see HUGE value from being able to work during these early hours…not just to beat traffic, but being able to do so much more in a day, outside of work. I can’t wait to make this a habit, and to have some of the large corporates in the city to change timings as well. Imagine the number of the dreaded Qualis-cabs, corporate buses and private cars/bikes that would go off-the-road during the regular hours.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this one (especially those in Bangalore).

While on the topic, here’s couple of interesting reads:

• Car Free Day in Bandra (Mumbai city). Love the idea and the way they’ve “marketed” the concept using well-designed posters and social networking sites like Facebook. Nice.
  I’m now thinking of a similar initiative to have companies shift their work hours!
• The City Fix: Exploring Sustainable Solutions to The Problems of Urban Mobility
  An interesting blog by EMBARQ.

Yahoo’s driving directions in India

First, it was RouteGuru. Now, Yahoo India has launched driving directions, with the added bonus of “auto fares” for that route! Sounds cool. But the reality…

I searched for the route from Old Madras Road to Cunningham Road. The good news is that Landmark-based driving directions (which RouteGuru kick started few months ago) seems to work as well as they do on RouteGuru.

But, here are couple of issues to be resolved:

• The “auto fare” is far from reality. For the above route that I looked up, the “auto fare” displayed is Rs. 45!!! That was probably the fare several years ago!!
• The results also show the time it’s supposed to take for that route. And, going by the results here, it’s supposed to take me 25 minutes to get there. Yeah, right! Probably on a Sunday, when the whole city’s under curfew!

Anyways, sarcasm aside, I thought the “auto fares” feature is a really good idea. But, it’s got to be implemented with a reality-check. You can’t release this feature without having tested it thoroughly with real-life data.

Interestingly, I can see this feature working very differently in a city like Chennai. For those unfamiliar with Chennai’s infamous auto drivers, they don’t use the meter at all…it’s just a “flat rate”, depending on their mood or state of mind at that moment! So, as & when the Yahoo “auto fares” feature is updated with more realistic auto fares, this could probably be used by those in Chennai to figure out what’s the bargaining benchmark, especially for those who’re new to the city!

With regards to the “Time” mentioned for each route, this is quite redundant, unless integrated with a real-time traffic monitoring system like MapUnity’s BTIS application. Maybe it’s on the cards…who knows, but until then it’s quite a pointless, even misleading feature.

Drive away parking blues!

Gave my car to the valet at a store on Commercial Street (once upon a time, THE shopping destination in Bangalore). For those who’re familiar with Commercial Street will know how impossible it is to get parking.

So, the valet ends up parking it almost a kilometre away! And when you’re done, instead of getting your car to the store, the valet drives you to your car in their car! Nice, eh?

Users’ unmet needs and how they find workarounds…

This user’s ‘backing up’ 1000 phone numbers from his mobile to his computer!

e-bike in Bangalore

Very interesting looking vehicle spotted in K.R.Puram (Bangalore) few weeks ago. I managed to take a hurried & blurry picture of this “e-bike”. Does anyone knows more about this?

Low-cost cars…dream or nightmare?

Vijay Sambav writes an open letter to Ratan Tata about Ratan Tata’s “dream project” Rs. 1-lakh car (approximately $2500). I found some of the comments posted by readers at the bottom of the page especially interesting…healthy (and even amusing) debate on the pros & cons of this project.

Quite timely, considering I’ve been mulling over this myself. It’s not the first time somebody’s brought up the potential issues with creating an automobile explosion in a country that is still catching up on basic infrastructural needs. This older story on Rediff looked at this project in the context of the boom in the US several decades ago…

The impact of a robust car industry cemented the US economy but it also led to a car mania that is yet to lose its grip over the world’s richest nation.

As of 2002, there were 590 million passenger cars worldwide. This means that there was roughly one car for every eleven people worldwide. The US statistics were, however, quite different. In 2002, it had 140 million cars: meaning there was one car for every two people in United States! Cheap car loans, affordable cars due to the economies of scale and a very large manufacturing base made Americans own cars as if their lives depended on it.

It is the American passion for cars that has seen the US become one of the biggest guzzlers of gasoline. Americans consume up 9,495,000 barrel of light distillates (mostly gasoline) every day. This constitutes 45 per cent of America’s consumption of all categories of fuel.

I can also see several similarities in the way the aviation industry has taken off (no pun intended) in the last few years in India. Since Air Deccan kicked off the ‘low-cost, no frills’ concept in India few years ago, the aviation industry hasn’t been the same.

But the impact is significant…airports in most major cities in India weren’t prepared to deal with the upsurge in air travel in the country. Infrastructure in most of these airports is only now getting upgraded.

The irony, given all the heated discussions about an ecological impact of this project, is when you visit the Tata Motors website. Corporate social responsibility seems to be big on their agenda…

“It (Tata Motors) is a signatory to the United Nations Global Compact, and is engaged in community and social initiatives on labour and environment standards in compliance with the principles of the Global Compact.”

“Tata Motors has planted as many as 80,000 trees in the works and the township and more than 2.4 million trees have been planted in Jamshedpur region. Over half a million trees have been planted in the Poona region. Tata Motors has directed all its suppliers to package their products in alternate material instead of wood.”

Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be much (or any?) mention about investing or partnering with the government in improving the road infrastructure in the country.

On a different note…If my last name was anywhere close to “Tata”, one of my “dream projects” would probably be to have 1 billion people ride around on bicycles!