Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Hutch bills on a cycle by the road. Cyclist nowhere in sight. Is this how courier agencies treat the security of their consignments?

Remember boys, beating your girl is illegal by law. But maybe you fancy a friendly computer virus instead?

Riding past a well rounded number.

This tea cup I got served on the train features various stages of a Hindu wedding.

Autorickshaws in Chennai don’t bother with using the meter. You settle on a price before getting in, and the prices are never the same. This fellow doesn’t even have a meter.

Saravana Bhavan is like the Shiv Sagar of Chennai. It’s all over the place, and even beyond, with branches in Singapore, UAE, USA and various other places.

It’s like they run economies of their own, with money changers for those who want to participate.

Via Shashank. This autorickshaw had disco lights in the rear and overhead and was playing Enigma’s Return to Innocence. No hidden barmaid.

This is the second Ganesh procession I’m seeing tonight, heading for the lake. The first dumped their idol some ten minutes ago. Both were rather large and coloured (possibly toxic), which can’t be very good for the lake’s native population of fish and duck.

And here’s Coffee Day’s funky wireless billing device. It prints the bill too.

We’re at Coffee Day. The waiter came to take the order carrying something that looked like credit card swipe machine. Then he gave us a bill and said this was just a confirmation and we didn’t have to pay until leaving. Took us a couple of minutes to figure it out. Turns out this is their fancy new “WiFi Integrated Online Billing System”.

We were discussing employee training bonds today, and this picture largely sums up the opinion of my colleague karthick. Via urmila.

The drainage sure is a great place to wash clothes. Where does your dobhi do your laundry?

What? Batman brand dried syrup peanuts?

On the back of an old Padmini.

For sometime now, I have been obsessed with the idea that it may be possible to build a mathematical model for traffic in Bangalore that could be used to predict traffic growth and identify stress points well in advance.

The idea occurred when observing the chaos resulting from the Bannerghatta road flyover construction projects, at BTM Layout and Dairy Circle. Both projects blocked Bannerghatta road for periods spanning years without providing a reasonable alternate route for traffic. In the BTM layout case, northbound traffic coming the IIMB side could turn westwards on the Ring Road into JP Nagar to reach Jayanagar, Lalbagh, and areas in central Bangalore, but there was no road going eastwards to Hosur Road and Koramangala.

The traffic police, to their credit, set up a diversion on a mud road near Bilekhalli that leads to the BTM Layout Bus Depot, and got that road tarred barely a year later. This is a wide road that is reasonably capable of handling the diverted traffic. The surprising bit, however, was that several commuters (including trucks) rejected this road, instead using narrow lanes through BTM Layout that bypassed the construction site by only about a kilometre, instead of the three or four that the official diversion required. I was among these daily commuters.

This was when I made the first observation: traffic prefers a short, narrow and winding route to the destination over a long, wide and smooth route.

On my first trip through these lanes, trying to get to Koramangala, I didn’t know the route, so I simply followed the traffic. If there were a lot of vehicles taking this particular lane, I reasoned, there must be a main road somewhere up ahead. I was right, and from that, a second observation:

Traffic attracts traffic. Traffic will discover the best route connecting two popular areas and saturate it. If you improve a road (widen it, make it one-way, whatever), traffic will quickly grow to saturate it, arriving at a stable state that makes the route feel no better than before the improvement was undertaken.

And somewhere along the way, a third observation: impediments like traffic lights discourage taking a particular route. Ergo, traffic doesn’t necessarily prefer the shorter route. It prefers the route of least resistance.

This is pertinent when you decide to block a road to build a flyover and the traffic ignores your official diversion, instead spilling into someone’s quiet retirement neighbourhood. You should be able to predict where the traffic will go in advance, and ensure that diversion is geared up to handling it.

At this point it’s possible to have an aha! moment: “Hey, this is just like plumbing! Routing water through pipes!” Or maybe, “Electrical circuits! Flow of current is indirectly proportional to the resistance of pathways!” “We can apply these models to traffic analysis!” Right, except both models have water and electricity originating outside the model and heading to a destination outside the model. With traffic, vehicles come from within the city and go to places within the city. The traffic a road bears, therefore, is also subject to what areas it connects, not just how well it connects them. It’s like when I was riding the Delhi Metro two weeks ago, travelling Civil Lines to Central Secretariat, the train suddenly got very full at Kashmere Gate, and then emptied again at Connaught Place. (See the yellow line on the map.) Turns out both stations are crossing points for other Metro lines, accounting for disproportionately high traffic in that segment.

To build a reasonable model for Bangalore traffic, I’ll need a roadmap detailing the current traffic bearing conditions of all roads in the city, and information on residential and commercial areas (assuming most traffic goes residential to commercial in the mornings and back evenings), including the sort of vehicles popular in these areas. And then there are the oddball factors such as exactly how the ratios of the four types of vehicles affect “route resistance”: autorickshaws, with their amazing turn radius; two-wheelers, with their ability to wedge narrow gaps; cars, with their natural tendency for lane discipline; and trucks and buses, which lord above the rest, don’t have to worry about being cut off by a pipsqueak on a bike, but are seen as traffic impediments by everyone else.

This is where I’m stuck right now. One, I don’t have this data. As far as I know, nobody does. To stand at traffic junctions collecting statistics across a period of several months requires coordination abilities beyond me. The Bangalore Free Map project was supposed to be building the base road map (hence my interest in the project), but now that shekhark has gone off to MIT for his PhD and is no longer prodding us on, the project’s stalled. Two, to calculate a numerical “resistance” score for each road segment will require some fairly ingenious math, and I’m not equipped to do this. I’m no math head. Three, I know nothing about traffic. I’m a software geek and may be wasting the prime of my career mucking around unguided in unfamiliar territory. For all I know, someone may have figured out how to predict traffic decades ago, or it may be that the contributing factors are so numerous and complicated, predicting to a reasonable level of accuracy may be well nigh impossible. I don’t know.

What I do know, though, is that Bangalore is one of the few places in the world facing accelerated growth with infrastructure struggling to keep pace. It’s one of the few places where you can literally see how traffic copes with stress and construction blockage. This is an urban planning study opportunity not to be squandered.

And yet, how?

Via urmila.

kingsly has an open letter to the linux and open source community that asks some pertinent questions on how the Bangalore Linux User Group, Linux-Bangalore and FOSS.in are related to each other.

Could someone who’s aware of the situation comment? No flames, please.

Update: lawgon’s posted his take on the situation.

Found this odd piece of plastic in dad’s room. Apparently the neighbour’s CD-ROM drive tray got stuck and in frustration he sawed it off.

Tow, tow, tow me away,
Tow me down the street,
Gently, gently, gently, gently,
Gently down the street.

Gently?

Truck full of LPG tanks with two handlers mounted on top. We noticed the seals were in place so asked if these were filled tanks. They assured us they were empty. Imagine if a filled tank rolled off!

I’d like to order two designer caterers, please.