Doing it right!
Amsterdam is building a new business hub, Zuidas, with 1 million square meters of office space to come up by 2030. This area is only slightly less than Manyata tech park in the north of Bengaluru.
The first thing the planners did is to place the development around the existing train station of Amsterdam Zuid and double the twin track to four already. If this wasn’t enough they are rolling out Mobility as a Service (MaaS) pilots right away. Traditionally you tend to own your transport, MaaS allows you to own a subscription to a shared service instead. Bike share systems are one such example. Platforms like #CycleToWork use leaderboards to incentivise usage of sustainable alternatives. Agencies like BYCS are in talks to roll out the leaderboards and survey-based targeting under a BikeToWork brand which aim to capture the sustainable transportation space and increase it. Leadership in encouraging people to adopt new modes is considered a part of the provisioning of infrastructure.
Contrast this with tech parks in Bengaluru. A Manyata tech park with more than 2 lakh employees only has access to the ring road in front of it. The buses fight for space on the ring road with thousands of cars every day. The single track Hebbal-Banaswadi and Channasandra-Yelahanka train lines which serve the area are taking decades to get trains running just during peak hour. Transportation as an afterthought to commerce is like business starting without raw material or human resource. How long will you go before you crash?
Even the International airport doesn’t have train connectivity 10 years after the start of its operation, not 10 years before like Zuidas has planned. We are still hung up on elevated corridors and road based interventions for self-owned cars which are thoughts from an earlier era. Leadership here is reduced to pandering to irrational desires of people instead of setting rational targets for the collective.
There is a lot to learn. Unfortunately, unless there is diversity in the planning process which does not pander just to the real estate mafia its going to be more destruction of the city. The answer is not in the masterplan but in area and ward level priorities which follow the principles of the regional structure plan. Striking the balance will need competence and diversity in the agencies. This is not going to come out of a severely compromised real estate focussed Bangalore Development Authority (BDA). Let us build that new organisation before everything collapses around us. The onus is on the citizens because the leadership is broken.