After sitting thru lessons from the Jayanagar cycle lanes rollout, the various DPR's that have been presented for different areas, polls by Praja both online & offline during mobilicity & practical experience riding on Bangalore streets we could be doing this a lot more effectively.
It has been established that the primary concern of safety & secutiry in a bad driving culture need both physically seperated lanes for NMT & a culture of sharing the road by motorized vehicles with Non motorized vehicles. People do 3 types of cycling broadly. Local trips to shop or reach a destination within the area, long distance or inter area/layout commute to work & ride for health/sport/leisure into/across the city & outside of city.
Because of the mixed use nature of the city I have found that local destinations & shopping is a start stop travel including crossing the roads quite frequently pushing the cycle to reach shops on either side of the road. If it is a destination like school or a mall then I get to park inside. These movements can facilitated by making the road a shared space with both MT & NMT via various signboards & if needed painted lanes like jayanagar or other options discussed elsewhere on this site.
In the other 2 cases where longer rides are required it would be more useful to make physically seperated contra flow NMT tracks along main roads across city. We could choose the 11 or more raidal arterials going out ot the city & plan NMT lanes all the way to the ORR & beyond with cross connection tracks laid along ORR, a track between ORR & CBD called core ring track & then the CBD where all the radial arterial tracks meet. Kind of mimicking the Big 10 & the circle routes/HOHO route for NMT. So people can cross over to the different radial arterials at 3 different points, at ORR, core track & CBD tracks.
The radial arterial tracks & the ring tracks become the bicycling & NMT highways. All local area routes can then connect to their nearest radial arterial or circular tracks at the various points to provide connectivity to the other areas. Bottom line, what we are missing in the pursuit towards the network is a backbone master plan. Its time we drew up the backbone & allowed the various plans to connect to this backbone. What say?
