TOTALLY STUCK It’s chaos on MG Road with the Metro construction taking up half the road

TOTALLY STUCK
It’s chaos on MG Road with the Metro construction taking up half the road
ANJALI MUTHANNA, MG Road


People who frequent the stretch of MG Road between Brigade Road and Mahatma Gandhi Park have a tough time, what with the Metro construction reducing one lane to half its width. However, it’s nothing compared to what people who use the other side — between Brigade Road and Trinity Circle — have to put up with. The Metro construction is smack in the middle of this once six-laned road, cutting its width to about half of what it was earlier. There are two breaks in the barricade — one at the MG Road-Dickenson Road signal and the other between ING Vysya and Trinity Circle. And, of course, the volume of traffic hasn’t decreased, which means there are mammoth jams not just during peak hours, but throughout the day. Since the side of the road that leads towards Brigade Road is narrower, there are invariably more jams there. PR professional Benazir Akthar uses MG Road to get from her office in Lavelle Road to meetings in Ulsoor and Indiranagar. “A couple of days ago, I took that route twice. The first time I went to Ulsoor at around 1.30, which was quite manageable and though getting back wasn’t as easy, it wasn’t that bad either. The traffic moves slowly, but is never stationary. However, I had to use the same route a few hours later to meet a client whose office is located just before Kids Kemp. Once you take that U-turn to get on the other side of the road, it takes forever to get where you want to go,” she says. In fact, there are times it’s easier to walk, says student Anandita Sharma. “I use this route to get from Old Madras Road to MG Road because it’s the most direct. However, it takes ages because the road is almost always jammed because it’s barely two lanes wide,” she says, “There are times I’ve been in an auto, got fed up with just waiting around, got out and walked to wherever I need to go. And that was at 2.30 in the afternoon.” It gets worse in the evenings, says creative consultant Benjamin L. “It’s taken me 20 minutes to get from Kids Kemp to Brigade Road.” But the other side of the road, which goes towards Trinity Circle, is relatively peaceful in the afternoons because the road is wider. Engineering student Rohit Bhat commutes from Frazer Town to Domlur quite often for band practice. “I take a left at the Brigade Road-MG Road signal and go straight down MG Road. That’s at about four o’clock and I don’t face a problem with traffic. I don’t take the same route back, however; I return home via Indiranagar,” he says.
Another issue that has arisen out of the Metro presence on MG Road is the fact that new parking space has opened up on the main road. This wouldn’t be a problem if the cars were parked in buildings, but they’re on lined up on either side of the median between the Trinity Circle construction and ING Vysya. When asked why he was parking on the main road, a motorist casually said, “No one uses these lanes because of the Metro, so people just get free parking.”
“I suppose it’s a comment on the lack of parking in this area,” says Pavitra Noel, senior senior editor at Digicaptions, whose office is located in Brigade South Parade on MG Road. “It’s now an unofficial parking area with a row of cars on each side of the median.” Benjamin says he parked there once and nearly got caught by a policeman. “I was with my colleagues on a shoot and saw the cop coming. We started moving the car from there and told him we stopped there because I (the driver) needed to attend to a call on my phone,” he says, “but I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone because it just
adds to the chaos on that
road.”