“We have 185 lakes in the city in the BBMP area and 200 if you include areas adjacent to BBMP border. Build a proper cyclable path around each of these lakes, at least those that are more than 20 acres, and try to connect them.”
This is the suggestion of urbanist Ashwin Mahesh, elaborating that this could be quite easy to accomplish: There would be the lake on one side and no habitation on the other. “If you do that, you will get enough cyclable corridors and then you can focus on how to interlink them,” he explains.
By boosting the cycling infrastructure and upgrading footpaths, he says, you can eliminate the use of motorised vehicles for a lot of short trips. “In our city, the weather is good enough, you can walk outside without difficulty for a lot of the times. We should take advantage of that and invest in sustainable options as well.”
Connecting the missing 60ft road links is another suggestion. “Throughout Bengaluru, there are a lot of 60ft roads which do not connect to any other 60ft road. We should have a separate programme of connecting all these missing links. Then you will get a much better network for local motorised transport,” he explains.
Today, people tend to use even neighbourhood streets for movement because they cannot go longer distances using wider roads. “You have to ensure that the wide roads together forms a network and fix all the missing links. It is doable. In one month, you can figure out all the missing links and in one year, you can connect all of them.”
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Published 31 December 2021, 17:34 IST