Traffic woes: When the solution became the problem

Traffic woes: When the solution became the problem
New Indian Express

BANGALORE: None other than City Police Commissioner S. Mariswamy lamented at a public forum a month ago that the root cause of traffic woes in Bangalore was ironically, the ostensible solutions offered - flyovers and the Ring Road - rather the under-utilisation of the same.

All flyovers, grade separators in the city and the Ring Road were conceived as permanent solutions to congestion, rising accident rate, vehicular pollution and other nagging traffic problems.

Yet, after they were built and thrown open to the traffic, one notices that the problems remain and the one-way, the simplest and investment-free solution, seems to be the only way out.

It does not take a statistician to determine that the city’s flyovers are being under-utilised.

At all such junctions at any given time of the day or night, including peak hours, the traffic below the flyover is at least five times more than that on it. This surface level traffic is just as congested now as it was before the flyover was built.

Two glaring examples are the Richmond Circle flyover and the Sirsi Circle flyover.

Does this mean that these multi-crore flyovers were unnecessary or that they have been faultily planned? The government needs to answer this question.

The Ring Road is another example of under-utilisation of infrastructure created using crores of ‘tax-rupees’. It was thought that over 60 per cent of the truck traffic would be kept off the inner city roads with the Ring Road’s completion.

Nearly six years later, the situation remains unchanged. We still have heavy vehicular traffic throttling city roads.

Given this scenario, one-ways are a viable solution. Costly experiments like flyovers and Ring Road may not have failed completely, but inadequate planning has led to their under-utilisation and consequent choking of traffic.

Owing to this fact, the police is left with no option but to make motorists go round in circles to keep them from dying on the roads.