[MDED]

The Govt. of Karnataka in its latest budget has allocated Rs.10,000 cr to fix the dilapidated condition of Bengaluru Roads, traffic and waste management. The CM on Thursday announced allocation of Rs.9,771 Cr for Bengaluru centric plans and out of this Rs.999 Cr shall be spent on garbage management. The govt. also proposed a special municipal act for the burgeoning city of Bengaluru.

To fund these aforementioned schemes, the govt. has proposed to jack up the petrol and diesel prices by Rs.1.60 per litre and raised the excise duty on already costly liquor.

Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...w/74503807.cms

[libranof1987]

Under the Smart City program, Pune got a bunch of money for a similar cause.

A lot of heavy-traffic roads have gone through severe beautification. End result:

1) Two lane roads have in effect because the foot path has taken up space
2) Footpaths have become as big/bigger than the road itself
3) Parking slots have drastically been reduced; the design for slots is such that fitting a sedan+ car is difficult

What this translates to is: all the good, wise folk then deem it fit to park on the road (remember the already narrow road), thereby impeding traffic

4) This may be Pune-specific under the Adar Poonawala campaign but a lot of streets have three separate buckets for trash

Now, the plus point:

The footpaths have been made pretty and walk-able so pedestrians have it marginally easy

Bottomline: these exercises have created more problems than solved. Although necessary, it doesn't solve the core problems.

[nagr22]

Well, sounds like some more taxpayer's money down the drain! The need of the hour is to develop an entirely new city from the ground up rather than apply patchwork on fundamentally flawed cities. No amount of re-tarring is going to solve the rotten road infrastructure of Bangalore.
What Bangalore needs is a Gurgaon or Navi Mumbai like planned city built from scratch, taking a global city like Singapore or Manhattan as benchmark. This will obviously take a very long long time but someone has to start the process.
Spending thousands of crores and making footpaths or buttersmooth roads is not going to make bangalore any smarter.

[pradeepkc]

My hope is that this doesn't translate to more ill-planned (and in some cases unnecessary) white topping of roads. What Bangalore needs is better planning of traffic movement, there's a lot of junctions and roads that definitely can use common sense logic. We also need more traffic personnel to manage busy intersections.

[mvadg]

I am really interested in knowing more about the cess that the Karnataka government has been collecting over decades as fuel surcharges. I am unable to find a single, easy-to-understand, analysis of the revenue and expenditure of this cess that was meant for improving the infrastructure. Also, the Namma Metro project seems to have cut corners to save money, but in ways not visible to the average citizen; again ticket prices are higher on Namma Metro for no good reason.

[Captain Slow]

Get ready for more white topping work again!
In my personal opinion, white topping is one of the biggest mistakes.

[GTO]

Mod Note: Thanks for sharing! Moved to the Street forum.

[commonman]

Hope this doesn't look like ranting.
What is happening with the road taxes collected? Road taxes are meant for creating and maintaining roads. When will the government be transparent to the public? Tax on petrol would be increased from 32 per cent to 35 per cent and diesel from 21 per cent to 24 per cent. These increase in taxes never comes down . Other state governments will also follow in due time. The saddest part of all this exercise is that, the crude price is falling all over the world and Indians are paying higher for fuel.