Two wide roads to Mysore

With the Bangalore Mysore Infrastructure Corridor having faced a long delay, the Government had begun widening the existing highway. the result work is now in progress on two expressways to Mysore!

Glide to Mysore in two hours from 2005

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Bangalore: Even as the Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor (BMIC) has taken off, work is progressing at record speed on the Rs 330-crore widening of the state highway between the two cities.
Pegged as the “comman man’s road” versus the “rich man’s road” (BMIC), the four-laned 141-km state highway is expected to be completed by March 2005 — a mere 15 months from the inaugural date of December 15, 2003.
“We are building this road at a faster pace than the Mumbai-Pune expressway. It has better features and will withstand wear and tear for 20 years,” Karnataka Road Development Corporation Limited managing director, M.R. Kamble, told The Times of India.
Funds were pumped into the 94-km Mumbai-Pune expressway to speed up the work which took 28 months — nearly twice the time for the Bangalore-Mysore highway widening. In a specific effort to speed up the Mumbai-Pune expressway, of the total Rs 1,630 crore, Rs 300 crore was spent only on machinery, while the total cost for the Bangalore-Mysore highway is Rs 330 crore.
The secret behind the rather unusual speed of the highway is that work started simultaneously on three stretches — Bangalore-Ram a n a g a r a m , Ramanagaram-Maddur and M a d d u r-Mysore. “In our stretch, we are working from both sides — 5 km from Mysore and 10 km from Maddur side. Ours is a four-lane project against the six-lanes in the Mumbai-Pune expressway,” Ankineedu Maganti, director of Soma Enterprises, which is working on the project, said.
The four-lane road has been designed for speeds of 100 kmph, which should reduce travel time to Mysore to 90 minutes.
But, given the number of crossings and four major cities on the route — Bidadi, Ramanagaram, Channapatna and Mandya — the KRDCL has estimated that travel time will be 120 minutes (2 hours).
Revamping the road: The road is being made safe, with most of the notorious curves being straightened out. Modified bitumen is being used to surface the road to prevent the kind of tyre-burst accidents that have become common on the Mumbai-Pune concrete expressway.
Kamble said one side of the 100-km stretch from Bangalore to Maddur will be completed by September and all traffic on the road will be diverted to this, so that the other side can be taken up.
“We have received a lot of cooperation on every side. Though we acquired about 90 acres of land for the project, farmers have voluntarily agreed to give it up and accept compensation,” he added.