I Should Have Just Walked
Today, I had to travel to work by bus*. The following information speaks for itself:
Distance Travelled: 12 km
Time Taken: 90 minutes
Average Speed: 8 kmph
Average Walking Speed of a Human: 5 kmph
*Due to some ONGC strike or something that caused a countrywide fuel shortage. I really can’t keep track of all these calamities, strikes, corporate crimes, riots and other assorted disturbances that occur on a daily basis in this country.
Category: Society
January 9th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Trust me, you got of easy. In Kerala this strikes are once a week.
Binny V A’s last blog post..RSS “R” Us
January 9th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
You could have used ragha power! Shame on you!
January 10th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Hell yeah, that’s why suburban rail rocks. Average of 70-100 km/h.
Of course, this is more a failure of the way things are organized than anything else. Other people have expounded on this much better than I have.
See requests for a bus corridor and also the poor Delhi implementation.
January 10th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
You should actually try cycling!
January 10th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Are you for real, man?
January 10th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Suburban Trains rock indeed. Best way to travel around the city.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:31 am
Hmmm.. that’s pretty fast! I recall walking 8km in about 1.5 hours. Thats about my best.
January 12th, 2009 at 1:07 am
Trains aren’t all that great either but atleast they move faster.
January 12th, 2009 at 1:32 am
In what respect are they ‘not great’?
January 12th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
that is the greatness of MTC buses! lol
January 14th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
They are not great in the following ways:
1. They aren’t connected to other modes of transport.
2. They are infrequent and overcrowded during peak hours.
3. The journey through the train station is reminiscent of a thriller movie.
4. They don’t cover the city very well.
5. They’re filthy and uncomfortable.
Need more?
January 16th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Have you really travelled by suburban rail?
1. Granted partly, but nearly all bus stations are within a 400 m radius of the train station. Guindy’s bus station is half a kilometre out on one side, but right outside on the other. This annoys me too. However, I can scarcely think of an improvement to the Egmore or Tambaram station layouts.
2. You’re kidding, right? They’re every 7 minutes (probably even less now) Tambaram»Beach and every 15 minutes (more often 10 minutes) Beach»Tambaram.
3. Talking about the new MRTS stations? That isn’t the suburban rail I was talking about. Yeah, those stations are badly designed, though awe-inspiring.
4. Suburban rail isn’t meant to cover the city. It does its job well. The MRTS will do the covering the city part soon, it’s looking better and better as time passes, though I disagree with using trains for this.
5. Hold on a second! You are kidding. Sure you can’t eat off the floor, but they’re comfortable enough and you live in some kind of utopia if you think trains are spotless anywhere in the world!
Sounds like you don’t use the trains. In any case, rail transport shouldn’t be used to cover inner city routes, that should be done with Bus Rapid Transit. Suburban trains work so good precisely because stations are so far apart (2-5 min between stations) and they run on dedicated lines (which are hard to lay in a city¹).
Personally, I’ve found suburban rail in Chennai to be simply excellent. My few complaints relate to the fact that the goddamn Pallavaram buggers always want Beach»Pallavaram»Beach trains, so that they can get a seat instead of taking the Tambaram»Beach trains like everyone else.
¹ Underground rail costs Rs. 250 crores / km vs. surface rail cost of Rs. 8 crores / km but it’s hard to justify laying surface rail all over the city.
January 16th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
1. Not my problem. Fact is that they are poorly connected and have poor parking facilities for people wishing to leave their vehicles behind and travel somewhere.
2. The overcrowding problem remains then.
3. The MRTS stations are scary while the ones on the ground are filthy. Both are equally bad.
4. Me: Buses are extremely slow.
You: Trains are fast and awesome.
Me: Trains don’t cover the city well.
You: Why would suburban trains cover the city?
Me: Why did you recommend them as an alternative then?!
5. I most definitely was not kidding. Trains here are a bunch of metal pieces with jagged edges and plastic thrown together. The seats are flat and hard. The floor is covered with dust and shelled peanuts or whatever else passengers happened to be eating. There is a layer of dust on every surface that isn’t a seat. The glasses on the windows (if any) are scratched, smudges and foggy. The fans are grimy and caked with I-don’t-want-to-know-what. I don’t even want to talk about the toilets on trains that have them. Travelling by train is like playing virtual reality Fallout 3.
Sounds like you haven’t seen trains in many other countries. They definitely aren’t as revolting as the ones here.
What you are doing is scaling things down to an Indian level. If I do that I would be thrilled to ride a wooden plank fitted with wheels and pulled by a steam engine that breaks down after 5 km and requires the people riding the plank to push it the remaining 10 km to the station.
January 16th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
The main problem is the population that will bring any transport to its knees. There can be no solution without culling the excess humans wandering around everywhere. Except that family planning and contraceptives are taboo subjects here.
January 19th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
I didn’t recommend trains as an alternative, I just said they were damn good.
#1 is _not_ a problem, is what I was saying. #2 is a problem in Japan, for god’s sake! There are only so many trains you can run on one set of rails, and our suburban rail already handles way more than most suburban rail systems (remember, there are mainline trains on these tracks too).
#3 I’ve sat on the floor of suburban rail stations. They’re floors, they can’t be clean, but they aren’t very dirty. It’s the tracks that are.
No way man! Personally, having travelled by them for 4 years, I can tell that they’re quite good. There’s no reason to avoid them.
They certainly aren’t as dirty as you say, because they’re cleaned quite often. However, they _are_ dirty at the end of the day, when everyone’s done spitting all over them. You can’t keep cleaning these things every hour, it’s a user failure at that stage, not a system failure.
I’ve travelled by train in the UK, France, and Egypt, at least, and the Tube is horribly crowded, the English suburban rail isn’t much better, the French trains have beggars, pickpockets and aren’t very clean, and the Egyptian trains, well, I travelled by a tourist train so it was quite nice actually.
Interestingly, my favourite trains are the ones from Gatwick Airport to London (I think) and the Calcutta Metro. Wow, what a lovely metro Calcutta has! It’s clean, air-conditioned, and on-time, at least all the times I’ve seen it.
January 19th, 2009 at 11:14 pm
A user failure and not a system failure? There’s no difference.
The only way you will find the trains here satisfactory is if you lower your standards. You have listed some of the problems in trains in other countries. In India, we consistently have all of those problems.
January 20th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Of course there is a difference. No system would survive first contact with the kind of passengers that exist here. Still, I find the suburban rail satisfactory overall, and was pretty impressed by it even though I’d travelled by both British and French rail before I first encountered it here in Madras.
Overcrowding _is_ a consistent problem abroad. Check some of the Japanese lines, for instance.
Besides, when are you travelling by suburban rail anyway? I remember always getting a seat on my way to college and back.
January 20th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Then that’s no user failure. It’s the failure of the system to handle the user. Hence system failure.
That’s the point. I can’t travel by train even if I wanted. You want me to travel to Guindy from my place to get to Chetpet? That’s ridiculous. Does the MRTS from Madhya Kailash go to Chetpet?
Overcrowding might be a problem in a few areas in some countries but atleast you can be sure that they are making every effort to improve the situation.
January 21st, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Binny’s comment was stuck in the spam queue. Noticed it only now. Buy a bike or something Binny. Don’t be at the mercy of public ‘transport’.