Ankur Bhatnagar - Architecture, Planning and Public Relations

MAY 2, 2006  ................Ankur appears on National TV in India................

As best as I can describe it, Business Baazigar is an Indian version of Donald Trump's APPRENTICE TV show.
SkyTran advocate Ankur in New Delhi, India participated in a national business plan competition organized by a top TV channel and an industrial conglomerate. He submitted a business idea based on commercializing SkyTran technology. The competition is currently on air in India and many other countries. Contestants are being shortlisted after challenging tasks designed to test their business skills. He has already made it to the top 12 starting from one among 200,000 initial entries. To catch up on the programme, check out http://businessbaazigar.sifymax.com. 
(Ankur is the fellow wearing the blue shirt in the changing home page main scenes.  Click on tab #3 named "Candidates" to read more about Ankur and his business dream for UniModal/SkyTran.  He is 1st in that list. 

Ankur Bhatnagar comes with a professional background in business consulting, wireless and Information Technology. He has worked with reputed companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Wipro, Cellnext and others. His focus has been on reengineering business processes to harness value and on applying and architecting IT solutions for business units to extend their efficacy to higher levels. He is specially interested where technology enables capabilities that could not be imagined before. This often means challenging long held beliefs and assumptions that have guided businesses for years.

Ankur has advised clients in diverse industries, such as logistics, manufacturing, insurance & finance, garments trade, transportation, media, e-marketplaces, telecommunications, etc. He has an international work experience spanning India, USA, Germany (knows German -- ein bischen!) and Malaysia. He holds bachelors and masters degrees in Industrial Engineering from Indian Institutes of Technology in the cities of Roorkee and Kanpur respectively. As part of the masters course, his interests were in operations research and optimization. He carried out important research in application of Genetic Algorithms to solve the NP hard problem of Generalized Job Shop scheduling.

'Optimization', 'technology' and helping humanity achieve more for less are the principles driving Ankur's approach. Specifically, public transportation has always fascinated him as this is one area which is not really developing in spite of amazing progress of technology in almost all other walks of life - medicine, Internet, mobile technology, chips, cars and so on. It is time that we all think of new approaches for more effective public transport and move away from patchwork solutions such as metro rail, traffic light optimization, intelligent cars, and so on.

While being an optimist and believer in technology, he continues to be pragmatic, open to debate and appreciates fully the roadblocks and non-technical issues. He possesses a range of perspective from the detailed tactical level to high level strategic drivers.

He has also written papers on creating new business models based on emerging technologies to enhance public transportation.

Ankur is married to Prachi Bhatnagar and has a five year old son called Anchi (An from Ankur and chi from Prachi!). He currently lives in New Delhi, India and can be reached at 91.11.98106.15464 (mobile) or 91.11.2697.4130 (landline) or A.Bhatnagar at SkyTran.net .

INTRODUCTION

Income disparities are high in India. A small fraction of the population can afford cars and is buying them feverishly as incomes rise in an ascending economy. What makes Indian traffic unique is that this small group is quickly filling up road space while everyone suffers from congestion. The 20/80 rule shows how great benefits are possible by presenting SkyTran as a public transport alternative much better than even the cars owned by this upper class. SkyTran not only can decongest roads, it can create amazing improvements in a city by reducing travel times drastically. Since the capacity of Skytran is high and costs low, it can provide the same benefits to the masses too thus truly revolutionizing urban transport. 

20-80 Rule Applied to Urban Transport
Author: Ankur Bhatnagar ©2006

20-80 rule is one of the most common tools used by business consultants and analysts. It is a general principle and it means that often a large part (“80%”) of most effects or phenomenon is attributable to a very small set of reasons or factors (“20%”). It is useful because it implies that a large part of a problem can be solved by just controlling a small number of factors, or a major part of an opportunity can be quickly realised by focusing on a small set of controls.

The numbers 20 and 80 are not to be taken literally, they just mean very small and very large respectively.

As examples, we may often find that 80% cost of inventory for an enterprise may be due to only 20% of items; 80% of sales comes only from 20% customers; world's 80% crude oil is produced by only 20% oil fields; 80% wealth is in the hands of only 20% population, and so on

In this article, we see how this 20-80 rule is applicable to urban traffic, and whether this rule brings out new lessons to be learnt.

It is well known that in India only a small fraction of people owns cars. If you peep out of your window and look at the street, you will find a very large number of cars filling up the roads, parking lots, driveways, walkways, residential areas, and almost all open space accessible to the wheels of the cars. Only a small fraction of space is actually used by buses or mini-buses that are used by poor for transport.

Stating it in the format of the 20-80 rule, it turns out that only 20% of population (car users) ends up causing 80% congestion! While this fact is well known to everyone, the planners miss the opportunity when they go further from here. Most planners continue targeting the 80% population, which contributes to only 20% of congestion.

They call for more buses and more mass transport options to ease the traffic. They also insist that the mass transport must be affordable by poor. The resulting scenario is familiar - search for more space on public land, reservation of space for mass transport (e.g., BRT and Metro Rail), reduction of space for cars, and high costs/low ticket pricing resulting in subsidy burden. When people don’t switch from cars to mass transport, there are demands to increase the taxes on cars and fuel. And, by the way, the switch from cars to mass transport is still marginal 

In the end, everyone is still in the same situation. Poor people were already travelling in buses. The improvement for them is only marginal. If you target solving only 20% part of the problem, in the best case, that’s what you will get. While poor have more buses, their travel speed and travel experience remains pathetic, as buses and trains simply don't increase speed. They have rigid routes, must stop at all stations and require a lot of walking, waiting, standing, halting, and in the process, killing speed and convenience.

The car users make shriller noises as they are made to pay still higher taxes and the road space decreases for them, or at least it doesn’t increase as much.

Then there is a strong and valid suggestion that the cost of cars should in fact be lowered so that more people can travel faster and in comfort.

The debate within the transport expert community ends up being chaotic, contradictory and confusing.

The 20-80 rule tells us to look at the situation differently. It says that since 80% of the problem (congestion) is only because of 20% of users, create solutions for those 20% users rather than for 80% users who are already managed. 

Let us review the attributes of such a solution:

  1. It can be a lightweight and cheaper solution, as it needs to cater to far smaller number of users.
  2. It doesn't have to carry the bulk of traffic, although if it can, it would be an additional advantage.
  3. The two segments - the car users and mass users are two separate segments with separate needs. The former are willing to pay much higher in return of a much better service than the latter.
  4. The performance attributes of the solution must match and exceed that of cars. That means we must acknowledge the superior travel experience of a car over mass transit modes, which many planners fail to do.
  5. While providing a service superior to that of cars and therefore much better than mass transport, if it provides sufficient capacity in low cost it could result in a transport revolution for the city.
  6. This solution must be different from cars, i.e., it must not have the disadvantages associated with cars. It must not add its own congestion, must not pollute, consume lower energy and occupy minimal space.

Not only the cost of this solution will be lower, these targeted 20% users (car users) are also those who have the paying power as they belong to the higher economic segment. That means this solution doesn’t have to be subsidised.

The conventional approach tries to remove only 20% congestion by deploying hugely costly transit systems for the masses. If the ticket price is increased by even a rupee or two, the masses start shifting back to older modes nullifying the new initiatives. Not to mention the vociferous protests. The only alternative then is to keep the ticket prices artificially low and look for other revenue alternatives and still suffer losses.

The obvious question is what is that solution that targets 20% upper end users and has the attributes listed above. Since this solution has to be better than the car transport, let us first see in what ways are cars better than mass transport mode. Note that we are comparing the performance criteria from the point of view of users, not planners. While planners have a long list why car is a worse transport mode than mass transit, the users have an equally long list on why they prefer cars to mass transit.

 Cars have clear advantages over mass transit in the following terms:

  1. Comfortable seated travel
  2. No waiting for the vehicle – always available
  3. No inter-modal or same mode interchange hassles
  4. Car is faster as it doesn’t have to stop at intermediate points except intersections and congestion bottlenecks
  5. No jostling with crowds
  6. Minimal exposure to dust and grime

In essence, a user reaches his destination in lesser time and in a better shape more ready and productive to attend to his purpose at the destination in a car. The mass transit systems just cannot provide these benefits. Experts often undervalue them. For example, they feel that by providing air conditioning in buses or trains the travel will become convenient, even when they take away seats to make room for more people!

A solution targeting the car user must at least match the above benefits. If this solution can achieve this, provide even better performance at low enough cost, and in capacity more than that required by top 20% population, it would be nothing short of a revolution as masses too will be able to take advantage of it.

Among the existing alternatives there is none that can fulfil the above described need. Therefore, new ways will have to be considered. Personal Rapid Transit technology, especially SkyTran technology by UniModal is one such solution.

SkyTran takes the travel experience to the next level. It matches and exceeds the performance criteria of a car not only from the end users’ perspective, but also doesn’t have any of the disadvantages associated with cars such as congestion, pollution, space gobbling, high accident rate. It costs not only lower than cars, it costs lower than even mass transit systems while providing capacities unmatchable by mass transit systems. It beats speed advantage of cars by orders of magnitude even if SkyTran runs at half of its rated speed of 160 km/hr. As a result, SkyTran will not only be successful in attracting car users, its advantages will flow to all sections of users. 

Also note that though at the moment decongesting is the main objective of planners, SkyTran allows them to go beyond that. In the absence of congestion people will be able to travel up to a speed benchmarked by inherent upper speed limits on city roads. However, SkyTran will allow them to travel much faster than that with much greater safety thus achieving objectives much beyond traffic decongestion.

For more information on SkyTran, refer to http://www.skytran.net and http://www.unimodal.com.
The author may be contacted at a.bhatnagar at skytran.net.


 

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