Urban Development with zoning for minimizing traffic entropy

Urban Road Network Development is an important integral aspect of any urban development. The standards of construction of State roads are available with Indian Roads Congress at nominal cost by mail. However these standards seem to refer only to the civil construction of roads as such without referring to various other important civic needs of a community, with an urban reference, in particular. Praja who is actively engaged in improving the lot of mega city dwellers, is very conscious about bridging this gap.

Bangalore has experienced an explosive growth in a past few decades, which is chaotic and intrusive of rural land use. The type of development also known as vernacular type of development, in turn attempts to give a workable relationship between the urban and rural environments.

The zoning concept on the other hand, is a basic requirement important for urban development towards minimizing the traffic entropy. The entropy is a variable indicating the disorder of any system, and plays an important role in the second law of thermodynamics. The comparability between the environmental impact of urbanization and the thermodynamic entropy has been systematically analyzed, which has led to The Urban Environment Entropy Model. Thus the importance of zoning along with sufficient green belts cannot be under estimated.

The article on The Five Dimensions of compact city development evaluates the efficacy of five smart growth instruments in bringing forth compact urban development and nontraditional neighborhood design. The article first sets forth a set of quantitative measures that rationalize five dimensions of compact urban development and nontraditional neighborhood design:

1. Street network connectivity
2. Density
3. Land use mix
4. Accessibility
5. Pedestrian walk ability.

Using these measures, three study areas were evaluated to determine how well their urban development patterns meet smart growth principles. However, smart growth plans have not branched out into non-traditional aspects of planning to encourage mixed land uses and to improve regional accessibility.

Modern day cities in developing countries tend to become bigger and bigger as time passes. The size of a city depends on the land used for housing, Industries and the workforce, to keep the Industry going. The workforce in turn attracts additional support people, and additional land for use. The total area of a city is thus the land required for:

1.Industries
2.People
3.Public Utilities:
a)Parks
b)Malls
c)Busyness Centers
d)Transport Stations
e)Hotels and Restaurants
f)Schools and Collages
g)Road Network
h)etc.

In a growing city like Bangalore for example, bad road net work utilization and or bad traffic regulation could be disastrous.



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In the current blog, traffic entropy is visualized as a measure of wastage in fuel and time of total traffic participants on any given day in the life of a city.

It is proposed to restrict the area of interest of the city of Bangalore for simplicity to the area between 100 and 80 feet roads on one hand, and the CMH and 13th main roads on the other hand, as shown in the Google Map above. The area of interest as above will be analyzed for introduction of one ways, uninterrupted traffic on arterial roads, integration of Walk paths, cycle tracks and green belts etc, for presentation to the authorities for implementation.

This analysis post is Titled "A dream pilot project for a smooth flowing Indiranagar Traffic"