Features

While many other states are still grappling with giving their bumpy roads a smooth finish and their hiccuppy travel infrastructure a healthy push, Gujarat has gone ahead and written a success story on its roads, railway tracks and waterbodies. A look at why this issue has so much of Gujarat on its pages. Till about a decade ago, Gujarat?s roads ...

Gujarat?s roads have been hailed as good infrastructural achievement of the Government of Gujarat. In the last one and a half decade, Gujarat?s road infrastructure has emerged as one of the best in the country. The state?s Roads and Buildings Department (R&BD), with support of the Government of Gujarat, continues to deliver a good quality and well serviceable road network. ...

In keeping with its commitment towards providing any assistance or training to people to ensure safe driving, the Transport Department of Gujarat has started an automated driving test system The state government has taken the onus of fully computerising RTOs in all the districts of Gujarat, making it easier for the citizens to avail services. Subsequently, many important measures have ...

Public Bicycle Schemes are a great way to popularise the use of bicycles among the youth as well as working professionals. Ranjit Gadgil, Programme Director, Parisar, a Pune based NGO, discusses these schemes around the world and the challenges in implementing them in India. A study by the Ministry of Urban Development in 2008 revealed that cycling had dropped from ...

Dr. Narasimha Murthy, a registered traffic engineer in California and currently an independent engineering consultant to NHAI for Highway Projects near Nagpur, writes on a few points that, if addressed, will improve and lead to better management of highways     It is important for Governments to recognise that ?transportation is the bloodline of any economy.? Most of the developed ...

Analytical models are essential tools in transport planning and in forecasting traffic and revenue from toll roads and metro concessions Urban mobility is a very complex system that often responds in unexpected ways. It appears that whatever we do to tackle congestion results in a partial solution that seems to generate its own problems later. We eliminate a bottleneck here ...

To do away with the limitations of static scales (dharamkanta) which mean a cumbersome procedure, consumption of time and traffic jams, the weigh-in-motion technology seems to be finding favour with the enforcement agencies. Though the static scales promise to hold their ground for quite a few years, the WIM scales will change the way weighing machinery moved on the highways. ...

By providing many incentives and adopting a few strict regulations, Germany has succeeded in shifting its travelling population towards public transport. Its ongoing efforts towards greener transport are worth emulating. Well known transportation expert Manfred Breithaupt, along with Mael Martinie, writes on the initiatives. Between 1990 and 2007, passenger transport in pass-km increased by 52% in Germany and between 2002 ...

Tender SURE, an initiative of Bangalore City Connect Foundation along with the Government of Karnataka, the City Corporation and Bangalore Metro Rail, has changed the very premise and procedure of designing and maintaining roads. Implemented on Vithal Mallya Road, the City Connect project rests on one basic principle ? if people outside of government can work with the government on ...

The operation of the iconic Sydney Ferries was privatised last year by the Australian Government. A look at the history, operations, significance and privatisation of these ferries. There are lessons in its roller coaster ride : Perseverance and constant efforts at making a public mode of transport successful do yield results. What is needed is a strong will to learn ...