Traffic or Terrific

“What is the slowest moving mammal in the world?” was asked in a high school quiz competition, to which a boy replied back ‘Human being in Chennai traffic’.  It might sound funny but it leaves a lot for us to think.

Chennai traffic is now-a-days very terrific. During peak hours, vehicles move @ less than 5Kmph in some roads. To beat the traffic, some corporate have announced ‘Early come – Early go’ option while some are planning to provide ‘Work from home’ option.

If google intends to take a satellite image of our one and only Anna Salai (actually it’s not ‘one and only’, we have Anna Salais’ in almost all the cities, towns & villages in tamil nadu), it would look something like this.

This will be the case even at 12 noon, when the Sun will be beaming its rays directly, happily drinking H₂O from anyone without shelter.

If I ask you to guess what the below image is, you might say it is a cup of plain tea or mosambi or some kind of a juice. But it could also be a cup of water kept for 10mins on the road near Madhya Kailash junction, which connects Sardar Patel road and Old Mahabalipuram Road (currently renamed by our ruling party as ‘Rajiv Gandhi Road’ to impress Congress president).

It’s all the pollutants disposed into the atmosphere by the vehicles, which got mixed with the water. If the cup was kept for more than an hour or so, the color would be entirely different, to the extent that you will end up guessing it as black tea.

Okay, that explains the problem… What do we do now?

Apart from the ‘Early come – Early go’ and ‘Work from home’ options, corporate are looking out for other innovative solutions. From my part, I wanted to provide few ideas.

XTML (Extensible Traffic Management Lanes)
Setup a R&D lab and find the ways to construct a road, whose traffic capacity can be increased dynamically. Just like the same broadband cable with the capacity of providing various band widths ranging from 128Kbps to 2Mbps (as in Indian standards) or even more (as in other developed nations).

I propose to measure the traffic capacity of a road in Vbps (Vehicles base per stretch). This will tell you the number of vehicles the road stretch can hold.
Vehicle here means the average vehicle which is a mid-sized car or so called sedan (Compact Sedans introduced by TATA should not be considered in this case).
Stretch here means a single lane road of 1Km distance.
As per this measurement, a 100Vbps road means that the road can hold 100 mid-sized cars with in 1Km. The higher variants of this measurement could be Hbps (Heavy vehicles base per stretch).

Smart people will definitely have doubts here. Given that the size of the car is fixed and the distance of the road is fixed, how can we increase Vbps. The catch is the number of lanes that can be added to the road DYNAMICALLY.

How can we get dynamism? – Finding the answer to this question is the responsibility of the R&D lab.

External plug & play Roads

Setup a R&D lab and find the ways to construct external plug & play roads. Just like the plug & play external hard-drives, we can construct the external roads and keep it aloof. When a particular road hits high stagnant traffic, we should be able to immediately plug our ‘external roads’ and sort the problem.

I propose to measure the capacity of these external plug-and-play roads in terms of Vb (Vehicle base). Vehicle hear will have the same meaning as mentioned above. The higher variants of this measurement could be Hb (Heavy vehicles base).
As per this measurement, 10Vb means that the external plug-and-play road can hold 10 vehicles at a time.

How can we get the plug & play effect? – Finding the answer to this question is the responsibility of the R&D lab.

If you guys have any other innovative ideas, please suggest…