Sunday, April 27, 2008

Devana-Yelli??

That is the new punch phrase for a public campaign started by the Bangalore Mirror, to push for a better and a faster connectivity between Bangalore City and the fast upcoming Bangalore International Airport at Devana Halli. The "Devana Yelli " phrase is soon catching along, for its short and cynical color. For the non-bangaloreans :"yelli" in Kannada means "Where is it?".With just six weeks remaining for the Airport to finally open up, a lot of Bangaloreans are worried about the poor connectivity related problems to the Airport.
A satirical Ad in Bangalore Mirror reads thus.

“Check-in 5 minutes/Boarding flight 10 minutes/Take-off 15 minutes/Flying time 1 Hour/To reach airport 3 hours”!

With all the teething problems related to connectivity, it is the short haul flights that will suffer. Like Bangalore-Chennai or Bangalore- Hyderabad. A lot of ideas to solve the problem are making the rounds, (including super fast trains and cable cars) The solution whatever be it, is to be executed real fast. The Spanking Super Airport , without these solutions could well become a bottleneck. Fingers Crossed!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

It is true that the new international airport is very far away from the city and has no proper channel for connectivity now. However, we should be very proud and happy that our good old Bangalore has risen to the status of a true metro by having its own international airport sprawling over acres.

What I would like to highlight here are the measures taken by the Govt to improve the connectivity to the new airport. Some of them are:

1) A 21km long Airport Expressway is being constructed which will connect the Outer ring road and the new airport.
Elevated roads, crossovers and interchanges with international standards are also in the proposed plan. Further, service roads and underpasses leading to the airport would also be coming up soon.
There is also a proposal to join the airport expressway with the towns on the north of Bangalore via the Satellite Town Ring Roads (STRR)

2) Construction of Tunnel roads to the airport are also in progress. These would provide a signal free corridor to the airport from the city!

3) Namma Metro/ Bangalore Metro is also in progress which would improve the connectivity not only to the new airport, but between all the places in the city!!

4) BMTC is planning to run exclusive buses only to the airport. Intially 7 routes have been proposed from various parts of the city to the airport and these buses would be named as BIAL 1, BIAL 2 etc

I understand that these measures would take some time (maybe a year or so) to actually become effective. One of my suggestions may be to retain the HAL airport for domestic and short distance flights till the complete infrastructure is in place for easy commutation to the new international airport at Devanahalli. Otherwise we may have to provide small aircrafts or gliders or helicopters to carry people from the different parts of the city to Devanahalli, so that they can bypass the heavy traffic and reach there on time. Maybe some people will be able to afford that :)