Peripheral Ring Road works will begin by December

Peripheral Ring Road works will begin by December
New Indian Express

BANGALORE: The Rs 990-crore Peripheral Ring Road (PRR) project is set to begin in December 2005 and the road likely to be open to traffic two years from then.

Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) Commissioner M N Vidyashankar told this website’s newspaper that this project, which comes as a relief to the city motorists vexed with traffic congestion on the Outer Ring Road (ORR), is expected to get approved at the next Authority board meeting in the third week of June.

Later the BDA would notify the acquisition of 3,477.9 acres of land needed for the project by mid-July, the Commissioner said adding BDA has already begun the tendering preparations for the two-year project.

The estimates would then be scrutinised by a technical experts committee and 10-12 packages of about nine km each, would begin simultaneously at various locations on the 108.9 km route by the year-end, he added.

The PRR was conceived as the ORR which was conceptualised 15 years before it was completed, has failed to serve the primary purpose for which it was built - to keep the truck traffic off inner city roads.

By the time the ORR was completed in 2002, Bangalore had geographically expanded so much that the so-called ‘outer’ ring road had turned ‘inner’. The ORR no longer remains exclusive to the floating truck population, but serves all categories of vehicles. And the load is increasing unimaginably, leading to hundreds of accidents each month.

The PRR, which circles the city the same way as ORR, forms the ‘new outer limit’ where trucks can ply safely and fast. This, the planners believe, will go a long way in decongesting the ORR and other roads thereby reducing the accident rate.

The PRR as it is envisaged will not only have 12 radial connections to the ORR at different points but also seven underpasses where it intersects other roads. Work on all these packages would run parallel, Vidyashankar said.

Technically, the PRR is well planned. It is 100-metres in width and four-lane. It comprises 10 metre-wide median; two service roads; two 14 m green belts (wooded areas) on either side.

“The purpose of such a large median and green belt is foresight. The built-in redundancy can be used to expand the road to a six-lane as the volume of traffic increases in the next 10 years,” said Vidyashankar.