Chaos near cable-stayed bridge

Rasheed Kappan
From 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. and 4.30 p.m. to 7.30 p.m., traffic comes to a halt
A resident says
When I was young, we used to play football on this road
Traffic has grown by almost 20 times and people now spend half a litre of petrol to cross the road

TRAFFIC CONGESTION: Vehicles caught in traffic on Old Madras Road near K.R. Puram in Bangalore.
BANGALORE: The cable-stayed bridge was once touted as the ultimate panacea for all traffic woes of K.R. Puram, a critical, crowded, chaotic entry point to the city from the Eastern side. For its architects, the bridge was a marvel engineered to perfection. Yet today, the bridge has emerged as problem number one for many road users, caught in traffic jams triggered by vehicular growth and the structure’s poor planning.
The irony was stark and clear. K.R. Puram residents, who, for decades, had to just cut across the Old Madras Road to be on the other side, have found the bridge to be an insurmountable obstruction. Vehicle users are now forced to ride/drive nearly two kilometres to take a “U” turn, an exercise that unduly increases their fuel bills.
Too narrow for heavy vehicles, the roads on either side of the bridge are now mostly jammed. Chaos reigns during peak hours. Trucks, Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation and private buses, call centre taxis and private vehicles of every hue, cram into every available inch on the narrow track under the bridge. Yet, the bridge mostly attracts only the traffic moving onto the highway to Kolar and beyond.
Retired ITI employee Madaiah had seen and experienced the traffic transition. “When I was young, we used to play football on this road. But in the last three years, traffic has grown by almost 20 times. I cannot see any use from this bridge. People spend about half a litre of petrol just to cross the road. There are simply no underpasses for vehicles to cross,” he complained.
From about 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. and from 4.30 p.m. to 7.30 p.m., traffic on Old Madras Road virtually comes to a halt. “With vehicles of employees of information technology and business process outsourcing firms moving in and out of the ITPL-Whitefield area and joining trucks getting out of the Outer Ring Road, you can imagine the chaos,” observed autorickshaw driver Ganesh. He too was convinced that the bridge had taken too much of the road space.
The only point where the bridge makes some sense is where it flies over the K.R. Puram Railway Station. But this is exactly the spot where railway passengers wait to board autorickshaws and other modes of transport to reach home. They are forced to brave the heavy traffic of trucks and buses here because this is the only vehicular passage under the bridge. “Traffic jams are frequent here. It gets maddening in the morning when many trains arrive and the passengers alight in hordes,” said Ganesh who has seen that happen time and again. For residents of Byappanahalli and adjoining areas, a trip to Mahadevapura and Whitefield had almost become unthinkable because of the traffic bottlenecks at the bridge and the Bennigenahalli railway underpass, said M.F. Jose, Secretary, New Byappanahalli Residents Welfare Association.
It was clear that most road users had wanted a flyover perched atop pillars, and not a bridge that sliced through the area. “If they had built a flyover with many crossings such as the one in K.R. Puram, it would have been much better,” felt 70-year-old Mohammed Yousuf, who had lived 20 years beside the Old Madras Road.
If the bridge seemed like a colossal waste of resources, the railway under-bridge ahead stood as a virtual traffic stopper. This bottleneck slowed traffic movement to a trickle. “It is a daily hell for us here,” said N. Ranganathan, who moved into a nearby apartment six months ago. He had just braved the heavy traffic to cross the road, an ordeal that showed on his tired face.
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