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I was riding on a bus which was trying to find a route through two-wheelers, cars and poor pedestrians through the core city area of Pune hoping to reach our destination in time. It was early morning and we were already facing heavy congestion. I was reading the Times of India (dated 5^th Nov. ’09) and an article titled “Traffic Dept. turns its attention to Peth areas” caught my eye since it came as a pleasant surprise: it talked about “congestion charges” for automobiles!

Dr. Adhiraj Joglekar conducted an online survey to collect views and experiences of users with regards to the JM-FC one way scheme. The results of the first 136 respondents of the survey between 12th and 15th September 09 are summarized below. We thank Dr. Joglekar for granting us permission to use data from his survey and publish the results on our website.

It is apparent from this survey that though the scheme has increased speeds of travel, it has compromised safety of both vehicle travellers and pedestrians and cyclists, while increasing commuting distances and making it inconvenient to bus users.

PMPML has once again got the short shrift. Its chairman-cum-managing-director (CMD), Mr. Nitin Khade, who had been in the post for only about seven months, has been transferred out to some other post. Mr. Khade was already the third CMD in the less than three year life of PMPML. This comes in the wake of its joint managing director, Mr. Karche, being transferred only a couple of weeks earlier. So, effectively, PMPML was completely without a top management for a couple of weeks.