Rising Wisely

The symposium that took place earlier this year at cities around India, KNOWLEDGE IN QUESTION: interrogating knowledge and questioning science, has just been published. Click the image or here to visit.

“Are you impressed by magic boxes?” This is the question that one of the Bangalore Government’s secretaries asked me with pride when I went to their office looking for information about the magic box, a kind of underpass aimed at minimizing congestion.

At first everybody was impressed. This first of the city’s five magic boxes was set up in the beginning of 2007 and was seen as a perfect answer Bangalore’s congestion. Like others cities that experienced rapid growth, traffic in Bangalore evolved into a complex nightmare; solutions had to be found and the magic box is one of them. At first glance, this novelty seems inventive. The engineers in charge of the project combined new material inventions (pre-cast concrete elements) with new traffic decongestion approaches (the ‘U-turn’ and the ‘signal-free’).

They expected traffic to flow more smoothly and using pre-cast concrete technology was supposed to make this innovation more solid, faster to build and cheaper the other conventional methods. Indeed, it only cost between Rs 1 and 3 crore to build a magic box whereas other conventional flyovers can cost six to ten times that.

The magic box is proof that the Bruhat Bangalore Mahahagra Palike (BBMP) can be at the edge of innovation not only in IT but also in infrastructure design. But BBMP forgot that an innovation is not a toy but a delicate tool that must be used carefully — it means lots of setbacks and revisions before reaching a practical and effective end. Yet, from the incubation of the idea to build the magic box  to its implementation there was only one year. One short year and no studies on environment  impact or traffic management, not even a survey — nothing.

BBMP enthusiasm and blindness led inevitably to the Cauvery junction disaster. At first, it made a good impression: a costless project, using new technologies, constructed in no time, etc. Newspaper headlines welcomed it: “BBMP’s magical promise” and “Subway magic created in 24 hours,” wrote the Times of India.  Once it was up an running, headlines turned into “Chaos on the road” and “The underpasses of confusion” (Deccan Herald). 

The BBMP has omitted social context and integration in their calculations. Any innovation must take into account functionality, urban integration, accessibility and connectivity. Pedestrians living around these innovations can’t cross the streets anymore or do so at their own risk. The growth capacity of the area around the magic boxes has not been taken into account.  In short, the BBMP has taken a narrow, short-term approach; today’s easing of traffic congestion will be erased in five or ten years.

There are also design problems. The underpasses are too narrow. There is only one lane in the actual underpass, while there two lanes above ground. In some places, asphalt is already cracking.  The underpass has no light, no draining system, and the sharp curve at the entance poses a challenge to buses . Also, little thought has been given to the joints between the pre-cast concrete elements. “Joints between precast concrete segmental structures require special attention in design and construction,” says the MIT Journal of Structural Engineering. Otherwise water infiltration and hazardous settings can occur, increasing the chance of collapse. Magic boxes may not last more than five years. And their effectiveness which is not even good today may become a disaster in two or three years.

All the important considerations of innovation have been neglected here. Today almost nobody is impressed by magic boxes. And when the BBMP proclaims that they are going to build around 40 more magic boxes people feel more skeptical than ever. Hopefully the BBMP engineers will learn from their mistakes; but a quick visit to Bthe BMP offices makes me pessimistic. They remain proud of the magix box and blind to what effectively happens on Bangalore roads. And they still ask with confidence “are you impressed by magic boxes?”