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Bengaluru, Oct 28 (IANS) BJP Rashtriya Yuva Morcha president and Bengaluru South MP Tejasvi Surya on Tuesday met Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar, who also holds the Bengaluru Development portfolio, at his residence to discuss the tunnel road project and traffic congestion in the city.
The meeting has attracted attention as Deputy Chief Minister Shivakumar had earlier described Tejashwi Surya as an “empty vessel” and remarked that he was busy posting on social media without doing any real work.
Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had also commented that the bright sun “does not represent the sun, but the new moon.”
According to the Deputy Chief Minister’s office, “Bengaluru South MP Tejasvi Surya met Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar on Tuesday at his Sadashivnagar residence and discussed measures to reduce Bengaluru’s traffic congestion.”
Tejasvi Surya’s office said two presentations were made to the Deputy Chief Minister during the meeting – one on ‘reducing congestion in Bengaluru’ and the other on ‘why tunnel road is not the solution’.
Under the theme ‘Decongesting Bengaluru’, the presentation highlighted the current approach of the government. “As cities around the world focus on people’s mobility, Bengaluru is stuck in a car-first model,” it said.
The major issues identified were over-dependence on road expansion (leading to pent-up demand), lack of first and last mile connectivity, car-centric infrastructure, fragmented planning across agencies, lack of administrative support to key institutions and delays in project execution.
Surya also presented a comparison of the efficiency ratio between tunnel roads and metro system. Surya said, “The metro moves more than 40 times the people for the same investment. Tunneled roads increase vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT), resulting in more vehicles and increasingly higher emissions. The metro moves people efficiently as a mass public transport system, while tunneled roads carry vehicles and give priority to car users.”
He further said that VKT decreases with metro systems but increases with tunnel roads. “The metro is clean, quiet and reduces emissions, while the tunnel project is polluting and energy-intensive,” he said.
Tejasvi Surya proposed several recommendations to address Bengaluru’s mobility challenges. These include: improving the execution efficiency of existing solutions; Adopting a ‘move people, not vehicles’ policy; Prioritizing public transportation; promote integration across silos; And adhering to the principle that “the pedestrian is king, not the motor vehicle.”
–IANS
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