The transport issues faced by Panjim city’s new system, it’s various aspects are being considered under the Smart City project. A thing to be remembered while implementing any system is that it should be simple, user-friendly and it should fit in easily into the existing scheme of things. Thus with the narrow roads of Panjim compounded by the disease of car parking on the roads, we have to look for a solution on transport which is easy to administer.
With the introduction of pay-parking and the setting up of multi-storied parking lots at different places in the city as proposed, one hopes that car parking will not hog the majority of city roads. Even if the parked cars are taken off the roads in most of Panjim particularly the ‘inner city’, there is not enough space to keep a separate lane for BRTS – Bus Rapid Transit System as it is being suggested. Moreover in Pune where the BRTS was started with great fanfare with dedicated lanes for the buses almost a decade ago, the project has miserably failed and the Pune authorities are planning to dispense with the system and revert back to the regular bus system and further invest on a Metro railway – underground rail rapid transit.
While Panjim does not need a Metro it could introduce the hop-on/hop-off mini-buses that has been proposed by the Charles Correa Foundation for the ‘inner city’ and thereafter the transport rings where buses would ply around the city as planned by the Transport Dept. recently. This should essentially get Panjim traffic moving rather than become clogged and static as it is expected to be in a few years. Once this is done then other measures can be implemented. Public discipline is scarce in India today and even in Goa.
The much touted one-way system for Panjim roads is being compromised in two ways. The first by people ignoring the one-way system, mostly by those on 2-wheelers and secondly, by cars double-parking or even triple-parking on the one-way roads reducing carriage way that was intended to be expanded by the one-way system. However, first and foremost, we should apply our minds to streamline the entry of traffic coming into the city and going out which remains confusing, convoluted and confounding!
