A Conceptual Dream For a Real Bangalore Metro Network

Bangalore. Bengaluru. The once literally and figuratively cool Garden City/City of Lakes/pensioner’s paradise has become an unlivable horror today, degraded into a frenzy mass of concrete, vehicles, dust, heat and garbage. This story that has been said, told and chronicled a million times and more, of dust, pollution, congestion, garbage, soaring living costs, toxic lakes, water shortage, health problems of its populace and etcetera. And at the bottom of most of these problems lie the insistence of its population on using personal, four-wheeled motorized means of transportation for their daily commuting needs, clogging up the notoriously narrow pathways of their erstwhile colonial city, laid when the primary means of personal transportation was a living creature of four legs, and not a metal contraption of four wheels. This insistence has created a situation where the number of vehicles far outnumber the amount of road they can run on, creating what is called “traffic congestion”. Today it takes an average of one hour or more to travel 10 kilometers, or even more if you dare to tread anywhere near those hallowed locations servicing Bangalore’s world famous bit-and-byte development initiatives. The resulting outrages are mainly manifested through innumerable angry tweets, Facebook and blog posts and articles, mostly by the legendary freshly liberated corporate yuppie Indian complaining about “traffic”, but never about the traffic that he/she themselves create, the elephant in their own cubicles.

Today, everyone in the world except this class, who consider the motorized four-wheeled metal contraption mankind’s greatest invention and the epitome of all kinds of personal greatness, who propose wider roads, new roads, flyovers, underpasses and more of such asphaltic miracles as solutions for traffic problems which only seem to be more aimed towards satiating their car driving cravings rather than solving traffic problems, have realized that we cannot build our way out of traffic jams. More roads will lead only to more cars in an endless cycle of more traffic, more congestion, pollution, wastage of everything from time, money, health and such. Six months after you widen a road you will face double traffic on it. Build a flyover, and you will get traffic jams on and below it. So how do we solve this traffic problem? Public transport? Yes. Public Transport the Indian way? No. When one says “Public Transport”, most people in India today will think Metro trains, which are seen as some kind of magic wand that will solve traffic problems in one stroke. This is also exactly what people in Bangalore wish to believe, that all traffic will magically disappear from its roads the day the Bangalore Metro network is completed. In fact, most people in Bangalore wait for the Metro to be completed not because they can use it to travel, but because they think it will reduce traffic on roads so that they can drive more easily. Nope. Sorry to bake your noodle, but if you are expecting the Metro to magically solve Bangalore’s traffic problems, that ain’t gonna happen. Why?

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This is what the Bangalore Metro network is proposed to look when it is completed by God knows when.

This puny system of 4 and a half lines won’t put a dent in Bangalore’s traffic even the size of an average dent on an average Bangalore car. What it might do is take away some of BMTC’s earnings and nothing more. Though the proposed Bangalore “Namma” Metro network when completed (whenever that happens) might run filled to capacity, there will certainly be no reduction in the number private vehicles on Bangalore Roads. This is because the Metro as designed here is too unconnected, too linear and has a catchment area which is not even one percent of all of Bangalore’s population as you can see from all the yawning gaps between lines in the Google Map above. 75 km of line for a city of a crore people? Riders of the Bangalore Metro will be mainly people who now take BMTC buses, autorickshaws and taxis and also of course, transit passengers to/from the three major railway stations. The average private car driving guy who wants “other” traffic off the roads so that he can drive in peace will not take it, and it does not make any sense to him because it will be too much of a hassle. Surely, there will be private car owners those who really do not want to drive their own cars, but they will still have to drive the Metro stations which will then soon run out of parking space. Even on the Mysore Road-Majestic-KR Puram-Whitefield stretch if ten thousand people ditch their cars, they will only be replaced by vehicles from other areas which the Bangalore Metro network doesn’t serve.

Unless every single area in Bangalore is connected by Metro rail lines, there won’t be any reduction in any traffic here. What the city needs is not this “for the sake of it” Indian way of trying to fix things, but solutions of real international stature: a complete, comprehensive, intricate, integrated public transportation system that will have Metro railway tracks crisscrossing the city, reaching every single nook and corner, catering to layouts, commercial and residential areas, to business districts and tech parks, to apartment and villa clusters, to every single railway station and bus station, to outlying areas and ring roads, to everywhere, fed by a network of feeder buses and supported by a strong Suburban Railway system and feeder buses for last mile connectivity, the network like a self-sustaining web connecting itself and feeding itself, moving people from any area to another, giving riders millions of travel options via interchange stations. This network should also be so dense, a station never more than a couple of kilometers away, that taking the Metro should be second nature to Bangaloreans, just like taking the car is now. This network should be so intricate that even the “I hope other people take the Metro so I can drive freely” guy will be tempted to leave his car at home, as it will really make no sense to drive anymore. Sounds good? So how will such a system look like?

Ladies and Gentlemen, Presenting a REAL Metro system for the city of Bengaluru!! Behold!!

Oh yeah. That, my friends, is a concept of how a REAL intra-city mass urban transit system looks like. A 16 line system of 6-car Metro railway systems snaking across the city, dipping into catchment areas of all kinds across and around the city, delivering riders to where they want in the time they need. Shocked? Surprised? Flabbergasted? Yes, each line in that imaginary multicolored maze represents a Metro train line that could enable fast, easy, efficient, reliable, predictable and comfortable transit for us, the people of Bangalore, freeing us from the frustrations, inefficiency, unreliability and slowness of cars and traffic. Just go through the map and imagine the possibilities of you not having to wait at signals and get blocked by never-ending streams of vehicles, zipping from station to station unhindered by blockages and free of dust, pollution and delays, above or below stranded people in their vehicles, getting where you want in time what you want, arriving exactly at the time when you planned you would, with travel times taking only a little over an hour end-to-end even on the longest line! Of course, this plan is not perfect, a professional urban transport/transit planner or transit map designer will be able to find a lot of mistakes in there. But hey, I am not a professional, though I wish I were! 🙂

You can also download the map above in PDF! (784 kb)

You can also also see the routes of the lines as they would exist in real life on a Google Map:

This plan for a Bangalore Metro network consists of around 750 kilometers of railway track across the city, on which around color-coded 16 main lines and their 20 branch lines run 1150 kilometers of services using 6-car light rail trainsets, serving 611 stations, 65 of them interchange stations, and 12 of those multimodal transit stations. It will serve 15 railway stations including Majestic, Yeshwantpur and Yelahanka, the Airport and innumerable bus stations and bus stops. Compared to the present plan which is 48 kilometers of track and 47 km of route length, with 4 main lines and no branch lines will run serving 101 stations, including 3 railway stations only. And this of course will be the biggest Metro system in the world! The current biggest is the Shanghai Metro with 588 km of system track length. Some might say this is overkill for a city like Bangalore, but no, it is not. We should learn to grow out of our shells of “this is good enough for us” humility and dream big, really big. Why shouldn’t we really be the best in the world, today, as opposed to being good only at chest thumping about how good we were in the past?

The system makes good use of the concept of branch lines. Branch lines are formed when the line splits at a station into two lines. The train coming from the originating station might go to any of the two destinations served by the branch line. The Blue Line of the Delhi Metro is an example. Here, taking the Orange line 9 as an example, the train coming from its origin at KIAL as no.9 will follow its “main” route until Attibele, while 9A will go to Kadugodi diverting from Kalyan Nagar. The 9B line will run on the route of 9 until Silk Board, where it will divert to Bannerghatta National Park. In the same way, train coming from either Attibele or BNP as the can also terminate at at Indiranagar as the 9C line. Yeah, something akin to BMTC’s confusing route-numbering (lettering) which Bangaloreans are no strangers to. “This branch line” method provides much better flexibility in connectivity than individual lines, avoids duplication of routes and lines, prevents operational overheads and enables maximum and efficient utilization of tracks and rakes. The branch line system has been employed in many systems across the world, but this will be the largest one ;). This entire system will need a plethora of depots, control centers, offices, residential quarters and so on, and in many ways, directly and indirectly, Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation will become one of the biggest employers in the city.

You can go through the maps which are pretty much self explanatory and see all the options and ways you can utilize it. To make it more clearer, here are the lines of the system and how they pan out. Click on the heading and color of the line you want to see details of. You can compare that with the map above.

The Lines of My Imaginary Bangalore Metro Network

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Some notes about stations that will come up in some of the most traffic intensive areas.

MANYATA TECH PARK: The five Metro lines that connect this humongous tech park of 1.5 lakh employees will run directly into the park, with two stations right inside the park and not just outside on the ring road, from which it will be only a 10 minutes walk to any office building in the park.

ELECTRONIC CITY: A station on the Hosur Road highway will not make any sense because Electronic City is largely spread out. It will have two tracks, one along the Infosys Main Road and another along the Velankanni Drive. While the Yellow line from Silk Board will run straight along Hosur Road, the Orange line will enter the area coming in from Attibele to enable employees from south of E-City to reach their offices directly. The stations are are E-City Gate, E-City Main (Hosur Road), Infosys Main Gate, Wipro Main Gate, In front of (E-City Phase 1) and terminal at Neeladri Nagar with all its apartments. The Red line will further go towards Jigani running on a route with more apartment buildings. Electronic City Phase 2 will have a station with two lines.

WHITEFIELD: WEPPIA (in front of SAP), KTPO (a bit further from i-Gate), Whitefield TTMC (Vydehi), Satyasai Hospital, Pattandur (just before erstwhile Big Bazaar), IPTL and Sadaramangala (GR Tech Park) are the stations. there wouldn’t be a need for a station at Graphite India junction as the WEPPIA station can service that area. This will be enough for optimum access to all tech parks and offices in the area.

OUTLYING AREAS BEYOND THE OUTER RING ROAD: These “new” areas that have come up in the past five years such as Vidyaranyapura, Thanisandra, Hennur, Kothanur (North), Horamavu-Agara, Ramamurthy Nagar, TC Palya Main Road etc have been haphazardly developed with no planning at the whim of private developers, and are almost completely car dependent, populated by mostly IT employees and (ex-villager) locals. They have no proper facilites including roads and face debilitating girdlocks. Lines 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15 and 17 have been designed to specifically connect these areas with the rest of the city, especially through interchanges (line 15), and major connections being to the Crimson “Ring Road” line.

AIRPORT: A doubt many people will almost immediately have is “why no dedicated Metro line to the Aiport?” The answer is that a Metro line dedicated to the airport is not feasible. The two lines, 8 and 9 which run to KIAL here are mainly aimed at serving people along the highway north of Yelahanka, and also workers who live around there and work at the airport, while also serving passengers to the airport. A dedicated Metro line to the airport would mean excluding all of those people. For airport lines to make sense, we need commuter rail that will enable high-speed, high-capacity transit to the airport and back, and not a Metro line, which won’t be able to handle all the luggage in the first place. A detailed post about this will come up later, but for now check out the A1-A4 “Airport Express” lines proposed in our Bangalore Suburban Railway system.

“Bangalore Metro” by Amith Nag, Flickr | “Bangalore Metro” by ‘Sandflash, Flickr

What such a Metro Railway Network Can do

There is not need to explain the revolution in connectivity a network like this can bring. You live at Banaswadi and got an offer from a company in Electronic City? No sweat, Take the Violet line to Sevanagar (2-3 stops) and then the Orange line directly to E-City! You want to put your kids in a CBD school but live and work near Whitefield? No problem! Shift to Richmond Town and just take the Blue line! Your girlfriend studying at MS Ramaiyya and you stay in Jayanagar should no longer mean that you will have a long-distance relationship, thanks to the Green line! A Yelahanka native can easily get to her office at Vidhana Soudha on the Pink line or a factory worker from Katriguppe to their work place in Peenya on the Crimson line. Want to go shopping at Gandhi Bazaar Basavanagudi or Avenue Road on a Sunday from RT Nagar? The Pink line it is! And, there is no longer any worry of any hassle of you getting to a station or home to board or after alighting from a long-distance train or bus. Koramangala to Jayanagar (Lime line), Nandini Layout to ITPL (Blue line), Laggere to BTM Layout (Crimson Line), Shantinagar to Singasandra (Yellow Line) Hesaraghatta to Horamavu (Brown line), Peenya to Kengeri (Olive Line), Cantonment to Basavangudi (Red line), Frazer Town to Begur (Teal line), Jayanagar to MG Road (Sky Blue line) Kaggadasapura to Madiwala (Lime line), Bannerghatta Road to Manyata Tech Park (Pink line), Electronic City to Bagmane tech Park (Silver line), Sarjapur Road to Brigade Road (Gold line), Mysore Road to HSR Layout (Aqua Line) – Everything is possible! A Metro plan like this will liberate the city. Laggere, Peenya, Nagarbhavi, Andrahalli, Banashankari 6th Stage, Jnanabharathi, RR Nagar etc will no longer be disconnected backwaters anymore.

And it is not just connectivity. People will get far more time for themselves and to spend with their friends and families, pollution, dust and associated problems will come down, the city will get cooler, people will be less tired and of course, happier and healthier, the city will save millions on maintaining and building roads and infrastructure and on importing fuel and so on. Very simply put, everything will move faster in Bangalore. Our lives will have order in them, as we will know when and where we will reach in what time, thanks to the predictability of the network. It is not just people going to office, but everybody and everything. You will have time for a lot more things! The city will spread out more, people can live where they want to, without being tied down around their work places. Just like our brains, conditioned to slowness and delays and car-driving orgasms are unable to comprehend how a pan-India High Speed Railway network can change our lives, we will not be able to understand how a network like this can change our lives until we get one like this. People who have lived in Europe or Japan might understand.

About the Creation of this Network Plan and More

Though it seems like it, I did not construct this map by drawing a bunch of random lines across a map. This is the result of more than two years of work, of traveling and studying traffic patterns and commuting objectives of Bangaloreans, what they travel for, purposes of leisure, commercial, official and social. The crux of this plan is that the most traveled routes of Bangalore should be covered by a straight line, every part of the city should be connected to the two Central Business Districts, the Majestic and MG Road areas and then the four major “IT hubs” of Whitefield, Outer Ring Road corridor, Electronic City and Manyata Tech Park and all transit points (railway stations, bus stations) should be connected by at least one metro line. Being a radial or circular city unlike Mumbai which is linear, a Metro railway network for Bangalore should be more like a wheel, with circular networks bracing axial lines crossing the city. Consideration was most importantly given to lines that do (will) not have suburban rail connectivity. For instance, there is only one Yelahanka – Majestic line, the Green line, which again takes a circuitous route, and no lines from Yelahanka to Yeshwantpur or from Krishnarajapuram or Whitefield to Cantonment. For the high-density eastern and south-eastern parts of the city and the CBD, dominated by apartment buildings and large offices, lines are more clustered to provide more capacity and frequency, and for the western half of the city that mostly consists of individual houses and commercial areas, tracks are more spread out as single lines out to cater to maximum areas, hooking each other up at every other station providing interchange options. While planning this network, I came up with some philosophies that became the base of this design. There are given below, explanations for which will be given in the next chapter.

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Cover as much of the city as possible.

Provide seamless, same-station transit facilities.

Distribute lines as per catchment area population density.

Stations must be located in the middle of catchment areas.

Provide infinite number of route options though as many interchange stations as possible.

Provide commuters connectivity to the exact spot of their end destination, at least on one end.

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However, even a network like this does not solve everything. A Metro network, though will provide easy commute between given points will not alone ensure complete end-to-end connectivity, because Metro lines are still essentially trains which have to run on their grade separated right of way and hence cannot serve everywhere and everyone, especially Bangalore’s residential layouts with their famous grid-like layouts. This is where BMTC comes is, whose job will be to connect Metro stations with each other and to ends of the city through the “white” areas in the map, providing last-mile connectivity, along with electric-bus BRTS corridors. The Metro network might solve the issues of in-city connectivity, but it will still not solve the problem of high-density, high-speed suburban connectivity, because Metro trains are too slow and stop too frequently for long-distance and even through-city suburban connectivity, which is where the “Namma Railu” Bangalore suburban railway system comes in, which will carry high volumes of commuters through the city and to its far flung outskirts and suburbs at higher speeds. For instance a Metro train from Majestic to KR Puram might take around 35 minutes, while a suburban train (in the plan). could do that in 20 minutes. In addition, driving must be disincentivized with higher taxes and congestion charges. More about a completely interconnected, transit city will be explained in the next chapter.

Of course, this plan, just like my Suburban Network plan before, will most probably remain a fantasy, because Indian cities are not governed independently but only as administrative units which are only a department under the state government, who have thousands of other things to deal with. Then there are all the powerful lobbies who would really not want to see a plan like this become reality, because it even if the earth is burned and the sun destroyed, they would only want to see their profits and power increase. Only nations that can free themselves from the clutches of caucuses that only want to forward their own selfish agendas and provide what the people really want have any hope of improvement. And a lot of people in the city, most of them rich and powerful will be against this plan. But when the common people see what a Metro line can bring after the current lines are complete, they would have to yield to demands. Building this line would mean the demolition of half the city, but what if Bangalore could be rebuilt around this plan, the “old ways” of the city demolished, the new rising up from the ashes of concrete dust? What if the Metro were to be used as a tool to create a well-planned, integrated city? Our ancestors had figured out how to build complicated cities with multi-storied buildings 5000 years ago, we surely can figure out how to do this! Most lines in the CBD and crowded older parts of the city could be planned underground and the remaining elevated. Interchange stations can be designed so that two trains will arrive at the same platform by means of points and crossings where the same viaduct splits into two in a kind of “Y-joint”, just like the regular railway, instead of building two levels just for two lines. More about designing such systems will be explained again, in the next chapter. And it is preposterous that the Karnataka government wants to build even more elevated roads that will only make things worse!!

A network like this was always a dream of mine, though not shared by many others, that Bangalore, or any other Indian city had a real, world-class public transportation network that will enable efficient and fast connectivity, freeing people from the prisons of their cars, so that they can do something far better with their time than stuck in traffic. It has been too long that we have been living shackled to cars and their inefficiencies. We need redemption, else we will all be dead, choked to death by our own cars. But will we get it? Public transport systems give cities the world over their identities and personalities, and if you look closely, efficient public transit systems are the hallmark of every great city in the world. The Subway makes New York City what it is, as the Tube/Underground and the double decker buses make London. Zurich, Stockholm, Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Madrid, Brussels, Moscow, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Melbourne and of course, Tokyo, all are examples. Closer to home, though not very “efficient” in a European sense, the Mumbai Suburban Railway makes Mumbai what it is. Such a Metro system would make Bangalore really count among the greatest cities in the world with among the happiest people living in it. Though this will remain a dream, it is a dream worth dreaming of! Imagine, as John Lennon would say, all the people, sharing the city on the Metro. You might say I am a dreamer, but hopefully I am not the only one here for sure!

“Namma Metro” by Omshivaprakash HL | Fizflicks Photography

You Might also want to Read these in Conjunction with this Post:

A Suburban Railway Dream for Bangalore | Riding the Bangalore Metro Purple Line