The presented transport development strategy need many improvements. The proposed capital city covers the major residential suburbs of the Colombo city. This will generate undesired traffic for daily commuters and log distance transport demand. The southern UC areas such as KesbewaUC, HomagamaUC and below has only a single road link to reach Battaramulla the proposed city center.
The proposed area for the capital city has UCs and electorates with highest population in Colombo district. This will cause higher stress upon residential market when the land is taken for capital city purposes. Further this will promote many ad-hoc land-use developments a which is very common to Colombo.
The proposed development will create undesired intra-zonal traffic demand due to residential and commercial mix in land-use which is not desired in large network traffic management. Thus many locally induced capacity and demand bottlenecks in road network could be experienced.
In overall I fee the research or transport planning knowledge put on to bring this plan is very poor and it is a combination of several past Transport development plans with some ideas came to officers when they have an evening tea.
It is desired more efforts and knowledge be put before developing these plans to avoid curse made by future generations on your souls.
Thank you very much for your comment.
We really appreciate your interest in this regard and also value the ideas you have shared with us.
(1) Stress upon residential market vs proposed spatial strategy
Proposed Spatial Strategy of the Capital City Development Plan expects to build-up the Capital City while blending its features with the existing residential character. The main features of a Capital City are prominence of administrative establishments and related activities and architectural and design components which convey the sense of a Capital City. Accordingly, it was determined to use prominent nodes and corridors to promote these special features/ components of the Capital City. The identification of these nodes and corridors was carried out based on certain scientific analysis such as development pressure, agglomeration potential, inter-relationship between integration and land use and node-place analysis etc. The main idea is to maintain the Capital City character along the identified nodes and corridors as they will be easily accessible for everyone and at the same time will create less disturbance to the interior residential areas. At the same time, it can be expected that the demand for residential activities will be further increased in these areas due to the impacts of proposed administrative and commercial development. In order to cater the demand, the plan further proposes residential promotion areas at the periphery area of Capital City and also facilitate inner residential areas as well. The identified residential promotion areas are proposed to be facilitated with required infrastructure as mentioned in the Settlement Development and Utilities Management strategies. The identification of such residential promotional areas was conducted based on residential suitability analysis which consider the environmental sensitivity, existing development pressure and infrastructure availability (carrying capacities) etc. In this background, it can be expected that even though the market will have a higher demand for residential activities, the city will ensure adequate supply of residential lands thus won’t make a huge stress on residential market as you have mentioned.
(2) Access to Capital City Center from surrounding cities/ regions
As per the proposed Transport Development Strategy, Eight Major Corridors are proposed to access the Capital City. These Eight Corridors are proposed in a Grid Pattern linked with existing three major corridors; Low-level Road, New Kandy Road (Malambe Road) and High-level Road. And it is proposed to widen the Low-level and New Kandy Road in order to maintain their capacities same as of High-level road. For your question in specific to the access from southern areas such as Homagama and Kesbewa, the plan has proposed a new road link (a major corridor) connecting Homagama with Battaramulla via Hokandara and Athurugiriya. Like wise, it has been proposed to connect and widen several local level roads to form a grid patterned road network which will allow alternative routes for through traffic and provide easy access to those who need to reach the city center. In addition to the improvements in road network, the other proposed transport modes such as LRT and Expressway linkages coupled with MMTH developments in Kottawa, Kaduwela and Koswatta will provide mode choices for passengers and will also contribute to reduce the vehicular traffic. The impacts of these road and other transport development projects were evaluated with Strada Modeling and Space Syntax Analysis. It was found that the proposed road network will contribute to increase the volume capacities while reducing the traffic congestion and also will help to divert considerable amount of traffic to the introduced new road links. As per the Strada Modeling results, it has shown that proposed LRT network will attract considerable level of passenger volumes