Security through mobility, not just in mobility

Analysing the bus and road network in Bengaluru to propose the possibility of increased mobility thus encouraging more personal security + accesibility for women. With a particular focus on introducing Feeder Busses. A safeyelli.in project

• Context
• Problem Statement
• Avant-garde routing
• Analysing the Network
• Interactive Possibilities

Context

• Women face a lot of issues with accessibility through the lens of safety on roads. ¹
  • SafeYelli ² has been documenting it for over a year. So have SafeCity ³, SafetyPin ⁴ and other solutions
• Safety and access to public spaces in the city are negotiated for accessibility to the self by women ⁵

Motivations to design with

• Crime Prevention Through Environment Design (CPTED) is something that can be used to redesign bustands as safety islands as opposed to the City’s initative to build safety islands ⁶
• Constant life and movement should be encouraged by mixed activites. Bus Stands in India are already full of mixed activites, but can it be formally encouraged? ⁷
• Feeder busses would encourage constant activity. [Need Citation]
• A data visualisation to realise the areas that are not covered by existing bus routes and would be helped by feeder busses. A system? could be created.
• What new methods exist to understanding a complex routing system? Through SFNetworks and STPlanner packages for R.

Problem statement

• Smaller or no Bus travel roads need to have busses running through them. Like on the inner roads of Ylk New Town.
• What are these roads that the BMTC needs to run new routes on?
  • Are they based on population density?
  • Are they based on the number of workplaces nearby?
  • Are there a lot of long distance travellers? Do migrants stay in housing that is far away?
  • Are these roads deserted after a certain time?

Avant-garde routing

• What if i ignore residential zoning and route public transport through them.
• Would this not reduce private vehicle traffic possibly?

Analysing the network

Algorithm as i see it

• Load both layers (Bus routes and existing network)
• Find intersecting roads or roads that satisfy a filter within a radius
  • Filter out roads that do not have a bus route
    • Filter/Weight based on population, school density, work-place density, etc

Algorithms to understand

• I need to snap the nodes of the road network to the bus network for they both seem to vary in minuscule amounts that prevents filters from functioning properly
  • Filter out roads that do not have a bus route

Interactive possibilities

• Release this as a tool for Planning agencies?
• Enable visual interface for easing usage for those who do not have techinical knsow-how

Road Network from openstreetmap.org

Bus Route Network from KGIS server

Roads with busses running through them (black) and those without (red). Some roads are 300mts near a bus stop and can be ignored. Please note that this distance is calculated as a radial distance and not measured through the road network

Road and Bus Networks

L = require('leaflet@1.9.3')


html`<link href='${resolve('leaflet@1.9.3/dist/leaflet.css')}' rel='stylesheet' />`

map = {

  // In Observable, we instead create a div from scratch in this cell, so it's
  // completely self-contained.
  let container = DOM.element('div', { style: `width: auto;height:100vh` });

  // Note that I'm yielding the container pretty early here: this allows the
  // div to be placed on the page.
  yield container;

  let map = L.map(container).setView([12.967562,77.591629], 11);

  // base map
  let osmLayer = L.tileLayer('https://maps.wikimedia.org/osm-intl/{z}/{x}/{y}@2x.png', {
      attribution: 'Wikimedia maps beta | &copy; <a href="http://osm.org/copyright">OpenStreetMap</a> contributors'
  }).addTo(map)

  // Overlay Layers
  let roadsNoBusLayer = L.geoJson(JSON.parse(filteredRoadsOJS),{
    color: 'red'
  }).addTo(map)
  let roadsBusStopNearLayer = L.geoJson(JSON.parse(negateFilteredRoadsOJS),{
    color: 'green'
  })
  let busRoute = L.geoJson(JSON.parse(busRoutes),{
    color: 'white'
  })
  var baseLayers = {
    "wiki-osm" : osmLayer,
  }
  var overlayMaps = {
    "Roads with no bus routes": roadsNoBusLayer,
    "Roads with bus routes within 300mts": roadsBusStopNearLayer,
    "Exisiting bus routes": busRoute
    //"All bus routes": busRoutes
  };

  var layerControl = L.control.layers(baseLayers, overlayMaps).addTo(map);

}

Footnotes

1. Gardner, Carol Brooks. Passing by: Gender and public harassment. Univ of California Press, 1995.

2. “Documenting Street Harassment in Bengaluru.” Safe Yelli in Bengaluru? Accessed December 5, 2022. https://safeyelli.in/. The SafeYelli project is led by me and has informed all of my contextual knowledge on safety that I might imply

3. Safecity. https://www.safecity.in/.

4. “Safetipin, Creating Safe Public Spaces for Women.” Safetipin. Accessed December 5, 2022. https://safetipin.com/.

5. Paul, Tanusree. “Public Spaces and Everyday Lives: Gendered Encounters in the Metro City of Kolkata.” In Doing Gender, Doing Geography, pp. 264-283. Routledge India, 2012.

6. Iqbal, Asifa, and Vania Ceccato. “Is CPTED useful to guide the inventory of safety in parks? A study case in Stockholm, Sweden.” International criminal justice review 26, no. 2 (2016): 150-168.

7. Jacobs, Jane. “Jane jacobs.” The Death and Life of Great American Cities 21, no. 1 (1961): 13-25.