Bengaluru Flyovers, Designed to Create Jams
BENGALURU: Unplanned growth of the city has resulted in the urban infrastructure nightmare. The transport and traffic departments’ plans to decongest the city by building flyovers or underpasses have come a cropper. For, neither the authorities nor the commuters have any clue on how the traffic should move.
Take the case of the Hebbal flyover. It was aimed at easing traffic, but that is not happening. Earlier the road on which it was built was narrower than the flyover, but later the road was expanded and the flyover narrowed. Now, it has become a major bottleneck on the busy road leading to the Kempegowda Airport.
However, the BDA plans to add a new lane to the flyover, but it has not consulted the traffic police to get an insight into the real traffic problem here.
Similar is the case of the flyover on KH Double Road. Vehicles coming from the Lalbagh end and getting down near Bangalore Club end are stuck in traffic jams. The Dairy Circle flyover in front of Forum Mall and Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyay flyover at Yeshwantpur are also examples of bad design and bad planning.
Underpasses are no better. The Prof CNR Rao underpass is actually leading to traffic snarls. What about the Cantonment underpass — it has three vents, but no one knows which vent is meant for which traffic. The list doesn’t end here. Commuters travelling towards Banaswadi know about the dreadful traffic jams on the Banaswadi flyover, and it has also eaten up the road that existed earlier.
Solution
The approach should be hyper-local, and not copied from a foreign location where the need and demand of the citizen might vary from the area where the infrastructural solution is being implemented
—Vivek Menon, Urban expert