# Pondy’s traffic conundrum Canonical page: https://thejasonsamuel.com/pondys-traffic-conundrum [Home](https://thejasonsamuel.com/) > [Essays](https://thejasonsamuel.com/essays) # Pondy’s traffic conundrum Restored from Instagram stories · 28 September 2023 pondy's traffic conundrum. this is an important topic to discuss after what happened to bengaluru recently. now that we've established that they have nothing better than weather, it's also fairly important to know that in my quest to make pondy the next tech city, my goals are aligned with the following 1. more startups here 2. increase entertainment 3. increase quality of education and hire-ability of pondy's students. 4. better infra all four needs to be fixed if I want pondy to be where I want it in the next 10 years. the rest is immaterial. will fall into place. another beauty of this is, pondy is largely multi-cultural. is home to people from more than 150+ countries. and whatever that can be successfully pulled off here can be replicated in any tier-2 city in other parts of India the fact that the city of pondy is a planned city, makes it easy to do a couple of things. we have entrance to the city from chennai (ECR road and thindivanam road), villupuram and cuddalore. friday to sunday are peak times with tourists coming in. now that we know where we lie, here are some of the things that we need to fix in pondy. some early analysis points out to the following. 1. garbage trucks and heavy vehicles apart from daily essentials need to stop plying around in day time. move them to 11 PM to 4 PM. this literally removes half of the traffic during non-peak hours and a significant amount of traffic during peak hours (morning and evening office and school times) 2. during peak hours, half of the traffic is gobbled with large buses belonging to colleges that are in and around in pondy and the private buses that also run on the same routes. the rest half of the traffic is through bikes. bikes which goes from the suburbs to the place where all the merchant establishments are situated (the main city) and offices or to leave their kids in school etc., the first half of the problem of buses during these peak hours is not easy to solve. if you want to make this into a tech city, you should have as much less friction as possible with the existing people in power. guess who owns all the private buses? current/former members of ruling/opposition party who were MLA's or ministers. guess who owns all the colleges which run their fleet of buses? anyway, it's only a peak traffic problem and it can be managed in other ways including efficient traffic management. the rest half what I described above? it's imperative for a city to have an efficient public transport as a means of transport which pondy thoroughly lacks. efficient public transport reduces carbon footprint, reduces traffic, reduces noise pollution, increases quality of life. a city which is beautiful, a city which is highly efficient automatically attracts increased high capital allocation, attracts spending - thus businesses thrive and the wealth of the locals increase. this is something that can be done thus removing the need for people to even use their two wheelers to only go from point A to point B for a to and fro work and home travel which constitutes the much majority of pondy's travel during peak hours. next, we need to monitor other aspects of traffic. administrative officers from the central gov. (not the local one) of those who are working with dept. of tourism recently reached out to me two weeks back and we were talking on some of the steps that we could take so that i can make pondy the next tech city. the goal? we solve the traffic problem fast. so, when i talked with them - few things were evident. i am laying this out here for discourse. 1. when i told them, i expect zero direct business when the gov. approves a budget for this - things move fast. we are rich enough and have enough capital that the inherent need to solve this brings wealth in other ways that we don't need any direct benefit in implementing this. (as i explained before in the previous sections on what a better city with efficient traffic management can do) back story : expanding on my initial observations from mainly hand collected data, the goal is to using an ML model to identify and tag types of vehicles entering and exiting pondy from the roads I mentioned over 3 months so that we cns monitor traffic from outside, regular movement of vehicles and etc., so that we can draw mathematical models on efficient traffic management supported by data so that we solve this efficiently. 2. so, therefore when I told them the following points, things were moving even more fast. - i'll fund the tech and devices necessary to do the initial study on all the entry and exit roads. - i'll present it as a detailed report at the end of three/six months (as required) and draw mathematical conclusion based on that. we can even simulate the conclusions to validate the findings. easy peasy. - if the dept. likes it, they can fund at-cost study for the entire city which will take the same amount of time, after which they can implement this after talking with the state gov. stake holders and other public/private stake holders. i am not interested in liasing with them at this point. all I want to know is the list of problems and how we can solve it. not exactly prepared to the friction of solving it - this is an entirely another problem. but if they see the money that they're missing and the opportunities that they can make by making adjustments to their existing position to grab the new ones, I know a compromised solution can be reached. 3. also proposed that i do not want any names here, and any administrative officer can take the credit for implementing this. i care the least about this, willing to open-source so that this can be done in any other cities as well. meanwhile, i will have to write them an email on what else can be done. so, now to the main point. if you are ever from pondy, or if you have visited pondy, tell me what you've liked or what you've hated. what would you like more here? what ruined your experience here? if you came to pondy, what prevented you from spending more? important questions. feel free to send more inputs and points related to traffic and other experiences you had as they'll be important points for me to think over and work. my goals on this city to have more tech companies and startups move here is very serious. recently have been talking a representative of an IT company from russia which is scouting pondy as a place to setup their company. similarly, I've extended invitations to my friends in sf and newyork to come setup their operational bases in pondy. i am willing to help them set up offices, move residences here, help them on hiring, everything. completely for free since second order effects are largely distribution of wealth. no waiting for the government to bring employment. no waiting for the government to attract or setup investments. nope, na-da nothing. just attracting 10 diff. companies which cns employ 100 each adds 1000 in employment. it only grows from here. this is in addition to the earlier offering i extended for colleges here to do guest lectures every week for free by actual engineers to their students. i just want all of us to be foookin amazing. 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