DND going the BRT way

Lot of people consider me lucky, though I live in a big city like Delhi I still manage to spend less time on roads compared to an average Delhi commuter.
I travel about 20 kms everyday and spend close to 70-80 mins on road averaging my speed to 15-17km/hr.

Is that good? I would say that’s awful!

My friends in other metros would say that I expect too much considering the conditions on Indian roads in metros or other towns, according to them I still get a decent speed, but they don’t realize that out of these 20 kms about 9 kms I travel on an expressway where even if were to obey the speed limits fixed at 80 kms/hr I should reach my destination in a jiffy.

So what’s my point here?

With each passing month my travel time has increased, agreed I have to drive through metro and flyover construction- this when completed I hope would eventually reduce the commute, but I’m more worried on the time that I spend on expressway.

I use an expressway, I pay toll for its usage. Ever since I’ve started to use the toll road the charges have increased by about 30% and my travel time by as much as 120%

I don’t understand the logic of increasing charges for a service in which the quality levels have gone down abysmally. I’ vent seen a single effort by the concessionaire to improve service levels despite number of vehicles using the toll road has gone up exponentially.

The number of toll booths have remain stagnant
Numbers of counters to avail prepaid cards have not increased.
Even these counters can be accessed at only one side of travel which is little ridiculous.
But the most bewildering aspect is that there is no cost incentive for users to switch to prepaid cards; neither there is any regulation that penalizes users who enters the card lanes when they are unmanned. Now why in this world (read Delhi) would somebody want to get prepaid cards made for their transit when they very well know that all the lanes are open to them and they can freely choose the lane with the smallest queue, even if it leads to delay for user who has every right to zip through the lanes as promised by the authority.

And just to compound our misery these guys have come out with a bizarre pricing of 22Rs/use – did they ever think that people would carry 2 Rs change each time or they would be in a position to dole out 8Rs for each user without increase in average time/user.

I always fail to understand that even though there is a Govt representative on the Noida Toll road authority board, but are they made accountable to the decisions taken and the service offered, if this is continued I’m afraid that like all Govt initiatives this one would also prove to be a good plan on paper falls flat on execution and the scary part in this is that the authority would still be minting money out of our misery.