How Ahmedabad Got Public Transport Right | ThisBigCity 
For anyone stuck in one of India’s interminable traffic jams, a bus rapid transit (BRT) system sounds like the answer to a prayer. Cheaper and easier to implement than a full scale underground metro, BRT has proved a striking success in cities such as Curitiba in Brazil and the Colombian capital, Bogotá. Its former mayor, Enrique Penalosa, together with EMBARQ, a non-profit specialising in transport solutions, is advising Indian cities on how to go down the same route.

How Ahmedabad Got Public Transport Right | ThisBigCity 

For anyone stuck in one of India’s interminable traffic jams, a bus rapid transit (BRT) system sounds like the answer to a prayer. Cheaper and easier to implement than a full scale underground metro, BRT has proved a striking success in cities such as Curitiba in Brazil and the Colombian capital, Bogotá. Its former mayor, Enrique Penalosa, together with EMBARQ, a non-profit specialising in transport solutions, is advising Indian cities on how to go down the same route.

Investment of about $1.2 trillion is required over the next 20 years across areas like transportation, energy and public security to build cities of tomorrow, IBM India Managing Director Shanker Annaswamy said today.

Speaking at the IBM Smarter Cities Forum, Annaswamy said quoting a McKinsey & Company report that it is estimated that USD 1.2 trillion capital investment is needed to meet projected demand in (Indian) cities to transform the cities going forward.

Tube City: A sustainable water-purifying city for Delhi

Tube City is a design for a 21 km long tube running over the Yamuna River in the city of Delhi. Conceived by Abhinay Sharma, the tube itself would be a living sustainable city with in-house farms and residential, commercial and office zones. A central metro spine and road network would keep the tube well connected, and the structure could also draw in water from the river for purification and consumption.

(via Ufahari)

via poptech:

Smarter Traffic Sign Boards

We all in th Indian Silicon Valley (Bangalore) are fed up of Traffic Problems daily,and we’ll struck into traffic even if we get radio updates.

So i have a smarter idea to avoid getting strucked in huge bad traffic, we can actually modify the way the Traffic sign boards are designed.

The conventional way of Traffic sign boards what we are using now is it only indicates the way towards different directions.Instead we can make use of these sign boards in more effective way.

we can include a small in breadth and long in length DIGITAL sign board which indicates if there is any traffic jam in 1-2 km distance which should be updated by the Traffic Police so that we can deviate from that junction and take the appropriate route to reach our destination soon.

If this happens i guess the traffic Jams would be very less.

Bangalore,INDIA, Ashwin Murthy, #gdchallenge

The double-whammy of Peak Oil with Climate Change pose complex intertwined challenges for Modern Transportation into and beyond the 21st Century.The technology for something like that is close, and any efforts to build something of that nature would be a complete utilization of time and money, for this reason I expect the centrel Gov’t to start right.The answer to the energy crisis for modern transportation is “Solar Trains”.
There’s no doubt that solar energy is one of the greenest sources of electricity and the idea of using it to power transportation is not new. We’ve seen solar-powered boats and solar-powered cars before, among other things, but we didn’t know until now that a solar-powered high-speed train was on anyone’s drawing board. Apparently, it is.
Solar rail is a smokeless, noiseless rail transit system based on recent advances in solar racing car technology.Keep in mind that railroads use about 2/6 of the fuel that a truck uses to move a ton of freight one mile.  So with new means of propulsion they(Solar Trains) are far cleaner. Additionally, railroad diesel engines are operate at more of a constant RPM without the constant up and down throttle changes of a truck, this is a more efficient way for diesel engines to run and it allows them to operate with fewer emissions. However, to cut the emissions, solar technology helps build modern transportation.This may take time,but When it does become possible, now thats a modern marvel.
Jagath Suresh,India
#gdchallenge

The double-whammy of Peak Oil with Climate Change pose complex intertwined challenges for Modern Transportation into and beyond the 21st Century.

The technology for something like that is close, and any efforts to build something of that nature would be a complete utilization of time and money, for this reason I expect the centrel Gov’t to start right.

The answer to the energy crisis for modern transportation is “Solar Trains”.

There’s no doubt that solar energy is one of the greenest sources of electricity and the idea of using it to power transportation is not new. We’ve seen solar-powered boats and solar-powered cars before, among other things, but we didn’t know until now that a solar-powered high-speed train was on anyone’s drawing board. Apparently, it is.

Solar rail is a smokeless, noiseless rail transit system based on recent advances in solar racing car technology.

Keep in mind that railroads use about 2/6 of the fuel that a truck uses to move a ton of freight one mile.  So with new means of propulsion they(Solar Trains) are far cleaner.
Additionally, railroad diesel engines are operate at more of a constant RPM without the constant up and down throttle changes of a truck, this is a more efficient way for diesel engines to run and it allows them to operate with fewer emissions. However, to cut the emissions, solar technology helps build modern transportation.

This may take time,but When it does become possible, now thats a modern marvel.

Jagath Suresh,India

#gdchallenge

Smarter Elevators

I am not sure if any elevator manufacturer has done so, but it seems to me that adding some sensors and algorithms could significantly improve the efficiency of the machines in tall buildings. It could be a very practical application of utilitarianism, aiming to reduce the average per-person journey time as much as possible.

For instance, if there are two elevators moving past a floor where someone has requested a stop, the one carrying fewer people could be assigned the pause, even if the fuller cabin would be there sooner. Similarly, if a number of people got on at once and only one additional floor was selected, the movement of that elevator to that floor could be prioritized, bypassing people waiting on other floors.

To implement this, all you would really need is weight sensors in the elevator floor (or a tension sensor on the cable) and perhaps thermal sensors in the waiting areas to identify how many people are awaiting an elevator on any particular floor.

Another good mechanism might be a panel on the ground floor – or any sky lobbies – where each person waiting indicates their destination floor. They could then be routed to a particular elevator. For example, if ten people are all waiting on floor 1 to go up to floor 40, an elevator might be assigned just for them, saving them the delay of a dozen stops up along the way.

Jagath Suresh, Bangalore

#gdchallenge

Smarter Ambulances

We all know about the purpose of ambulance, but very often we’ll hear that a person was dead while he was on the way to hospital. This(Death) may cause due to traffic jams or any other technical faults in the ambulance itself, so we can put our brains to make this ambulance smarter which would at-least reduce such cases as i said above.

what we can do is we can make the ambulance and the near by hospitals inter-connect each other through the web application. 

we can create a database which includes all hospitals in the city and a front end web application to the front end users.

This should be made restricted access to the nurse in the ambulance and the authorized hospital doctors only, in order to avoid unnecessary tensions since this is a very sensitive issue(HEALTH), while the ambulance is being taken to the patient place one person in the ambulance can access this web application to see the near by hospitals available in that locality and can plan the future actions to be taken and reduce those problems(Traffic Jams) to maximum extent.

This can be also used to some genuine purposes also like if something bad happens inside ambulance like the person starts breathing very abruptly or any kind of problem which is unfamiliar to the ambulance nurse, at that time she can directly contact through this web application just by switching on the monitor and can take primary suggestion from the authorized doctor who is in the hospital right there, so that at-least we can reduce the criticality of patients while they are being taken to hospitals.

In this way we can make our ambulances work more smarter and can be made its purpose more meaningful.

Bangalore,India, Ashwin Murthy gdchallenge