Areas of Bengaluru, those surrounding the Outer Ring Road will face intermittent power cuts starting from Friday as the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company Limited (Bescom) will shift power lines to make way for bus-only lanes.
Bescom officials said the outage will affect various areas in the city for the next 10 days (till Ocober 31) between 8 am and 6 pm as officials carry out the shifting work.
Areas that will be affected are Devarbeesanahalli, Boganahalli, Panathur, Kadubeesangalli, Ashwath Nagar, Hemantha Nagar, Chinnappanhalli, LRDE Layout, Marathalli, Kariyammana Agrahara, Ramanajaneya Layout, Ananda Nagar, Karthika Nagar, Prestige Tech Park, Vikas Tech Park, Cessna Business Park, Munnekolala, Manjunath layout, Shirdi Sai Layout, Vagdevi Layout among other surrounding areas.
The pilot for this traffic intervention program will begin from October 20 on the 18.5 km stretch on the Outer Ring Road between Silk Board and KR Puram where the left-most lane of the road has been cordoned off with the help of bollards. With the bus-only lanes coming into place, other than BMTC buses, only ambulances will be allowed on the left-most lane, facilitating faster movement. While buses can use other lanes as well, other vehicles won’t be allowed in the left-most lane.
The idea behind is to incentivise bus travel, hence persuading more people to leave their personal vehicles behind to combat congestion in the city.
Officials might also allow other high occupancy vehicles in this lane as well depending on the success of the system. The project has been planned by BMTC (Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation), BBMP, Traffic Police and DULT (Directorate of Urban Land Transport) officials with the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike being the nodal agency.
The system is likely to be expanded to 10 other traffic dense routes in the city from November.
The move for bus priority lanes also comes at a time when the daily ridership of BMTC has been facing a steady fall over the years: from 51.3 lakh in 2014-15 to 36 lakh in 2018-19. At the same time, the length of cancelled routes has increased almost 200% over four years, from 241.6 lakh km in 2013-14 to 717.9 lakh km in 2017-18.