If you were driving on Bangalore roads last week, you would have noticed that your drive was much smoother than usual, you had to honk a lot less than usual, you reached office much fresher than usual. This was because much less no of vehicles on the road due to festival holidays and the phenomena was more prominent on Wednesday and Thursday. Wednesday and Thursday were off for most of the IT companies in the city, so either everyone was out of the city on a vacation or relaxing at home like me.
This observation sparked two crazy ideas in my mind to solve Bangalore’s traffic woes (to an extent of course). So here it goes –
Crazy Idea #1
Divide the companies in the city in 3 different zones – Zone A, Zone B and Zone C. Companies belonging to Zone A would give the compulsory 2 days off a week on Saturday – Sunday. Companies in Zone B would keep Monday – Tuesday as 2 days off a week. And Wednesday – Thursday for Zone C. So now what will happen is – all company cabs, buses, private vehicles of employees are off the road on different days of the week. Theoretically traffic should reduce by about 30% on all these days but even if it gets reduced by about 15-20%, it is worth it. There are other advantages also of this concept –
- Same reduction in traffic will also be seen at Malls, public places, etc.
- Buses/Trains plying to other cities won’t be running over capacity on Saturday-Sunday and under capacity on other days. Passengers will get spread across the week.
- Same effect would be observed for Hotels etc at popular tourist places. Even long weekends will also be different dates for different people.
- Imagine a husband-wife couple working in companies falling in different zones. Obviously such a setup won’t work out for them, so they will switch to companies in same zone and would stick to those companies for their own convenience. Over time, such people will get settled in companies and attrition rate would come down (I know this sounds crazy :)).
Crazy Idea #2
Well, this is not exactly a crazy idea and is quite possible to implement. This idea actually works on a similar concept to Idea #1 but follows a slightly different approach. All companies in the city should compulsorily have 2 days a week as “Work from home” days. This idea can probably be implemented at logical teams level. For example, people working for a project A (not necessarily in same teams) would work from home 2 days a week (Monday and Thursday) and people working on project B can take Tuesday and Friday as work from home days for example. This concept doesn’t have same advantages as that of Idea #1 but slightly different –
- This idea will bring down traffic levels in city as well as noise level and pollution level
- This idea will bring down fuel costs for individuals
- It will bring down costs like electricity, grocery supplies, for companies
Now don’t get mad at me for thinking wild, as I said before – these ideas are crazy. What do you say?