#Bengaluru : #Karnataka More than two thousands residents and employees of IT companies working around the Outer Ring Road and Sarjapur Road localities in Bengaluru took to the streets in protest on Friday, demanding the government fix roads and look at ways to ease traffic snarls.Given the banner of ‘ORR Sarjapur Rising’, the protest comes less than a month after residents of Whitefield, a tech suburb in Bengaluru, held a similar protest on a Monday to draw the government’s attention towards bad roads and the lack of public transport.
“It sometimes takes school kids over an hour longer to get home, and that was just frustrating everybody. The autowalas who we know around here say they have to spend an hour in traffic just to get the basic minimum fare,” said Priya Ramasubbam, a filmmaker and resident of the ORR-Sarjapur area.
Bengaluru, which has a population of 8.42 million according to Census 2011, has the highest vehicle density in the country. There are 5.87 million cars, bikes and buses on roads making for an average of two people per vehicle.
Whitefield and the ORR-Sarjapur areas face some of the worst traffic snarls, but pothole riddled roads and bad traffic jams are present across the city.
Residents of ORR-Sarjapur Road, who’re forced to use their own vehicles to commute, are proposing that the government add trains starting from the Kamalapuram station to Whitefield. The track already exists, they say, give us the trains.
Apart from this, residents have also approached the authorities to dedicate one lane on roads only to buses, making public transport much quicker and de-incentivising people to use cars.
“Bellandur Forum has been around for a long time. We’ve had successes in all kinds of other things and didn’t think protests were the way to go. But even with having put our hat in that we want to work in constructive ways, the authorities simply weren’t listening. Because everybody in our area was very frustrated, we went ahead with this,” added Priya.
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