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NEW DELHI: After several months, Deepak Mahajan came back to Delhi and was driving from Safdarjung Enclave to Defence Colony. Going up the new AIIMS clover-leaf flyover, he thought traffic snarls at the crossing were a thing of the past. He sped up, crossed the first left turn and as his car touched 50 kmph, he had to suddenly screech to a halt. The jams had begun from the middle of the flyover. Welcome to a world where flying over is yet to become a reality and red-lights at the base of flyovers quickly bring one down to earth. Life
hasn’t improved after flyovers and the office-goer feels
as harassed as ever. ‘‘Even after the long-awaited
flyovers at AIIMS and Andrews Ganj have come up, commuters on
Ring Road are still held up by unsynchronised red-lights and unplanned
bus-stops,’’ says office-goer Punit Kumar, who travels
every day from RK Puram to his office in Lajpat Nagar. Jammed
stretch Going towards Defence Colony from AIIMS, the jams often
begin from the flyover itself. ‘‘There are two red-lights
between AIIMS and Andrews Ganj and this stretch is perpetually
jammed,’’ said Gunjan, a resident of South Extension-II. Sudden halt Prasad,
who gets reports for all the DTC’s 2,200 buses, says loaded
buses are at risk of overturning, if there is a sudden halt after
zooming down the flyover. There are 650 traffic lights in the
city and experts say that at any four-armed junction there are
16 traffic movements — 12 vehicular and four pedestrian. The traffic police admit that many places still have 180 seconds of waiting time. ‘‘This automatically means long queues of vehicles that can turn into a jam within minutes,’’ says computer professional Indrani Chatterjee, a Chittaranjan Park resident. However,
deputy commissioner of police (traffic) Satish Golchha says signals
are re-synchronised after flyovers are opened. ‘‘With
the change i traffic pattern, signal synchronisation has to be
redone,’’ he said. But red-lights after flyovers are
unsynchronised and also prone to develop faults. ‘‘There
are at least a dozen red-lights that are defective at any time,
and the number can go up to 25-30 a day,’’ a senior
traffic police official said. Half these faults are due to fusing
of bulbs, while the rest happen due to short-circuits and water
seepage. Deputy
commissioner of police (New Delhi range), traffic, Arun Kampani
says: ‘‘Unscientifically located bus-stops obstruct
traffic.’’ But the traffic police cannot force the
civic agencies to shift them. Anil Sood, who heads a non-governmental
organisation Chetna which campaigns for road safety, explains
that a bus descending from a flyover and turning left for a stop,
‘‘needs at least 50 metres to avoid a collision with
the merging traffic from the underpass’’. Queue of buses A member of the Delhi Urban Arts Commission, who did not want to be named, pointed to the bus-stop near Chirag Delhi flyover. ‘‘The flyover carriageway and its left-side underpass merge closely. And you have a bus-stop there. Pedestrians can hardly cross,’’ he said. A bus-stop near a crossing means a queue of buses jamming the intersection. Traffic chaos is common at the IIT crossing with buses cutting off traffic flow. Sudipto Poti, who travels by bus from Green Park, says: ‘‘Buses from three different directions stop here. It’s tough for pedestrians.’’ The PWD has a proposal to make bays where bus-stops can be located without interfering with traffic. While 93 such locations are being finalised, existing bus-stops after flyovers continue to be a hazard, that can easily turn fatal.
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