The city’s traffic conditions are worsening by the day, but Bengalureans encounter their worst nightmare in the Central Business District (CBD), where traffic crawls in peak hours as school children and office-goers crowd its roads. While the Residency Road-Brigade Road and Cash Pharmacy junctions see some of the worst traffic pile-ups, the conditions are no better at the Lifestyle junction where the signals keep vehicles waiting for close to 10 minutes during peak hours .
The lack of parking regulations in the area creates its own set of problems as vehicles arrive to drop or pick up school children. Parking haphazardly, they hold up the rest of the traffic, and the situation sees no improvement for quite a while later. Ask urban planner, Dr S. Sudhira, and he squarely blames the policymakers and city planners for the mess in the CBD. “One must realise that as a result of bad planning vehicles are forced to use the CBD roads to go from one part of the city to another. When there are at least 10,000 students studying in the schools on St Mark’s Road and Museum Road, how can you escape congestion?” he wonders.
Mr Sudhira suggests levying a heavy parking fee to discourage parking in the CBD and improving public transport accessibility points in the area to reduce the congestion. Mr Suhail Yusuff, secretary, Brigade’s Shops and Establishments Association, feels the traffic police should allow two-way traffic on some roads to decongest the CBD. “Why was Residency Road made a one-way? The traffic police is not able to deal with the cars and buses that queue up to drop school children here. With such a volume of cars and buses heading for the schools the regular traffic on Residency Road is badly affected,” he notes, suggesting that a one lane pay and park system on the road could be the solution.
Project gridlock
With heavy infrastructure projects underway on around 27 major roads in the city in the last few months, traffic conditions have only worsened. The multiple infrastructure work on Mysore Road, Bannerghatta Road, Hosur Road, Outer Ring Road, Tumkur Road and Bellary Road is leading to traffic pile-ups and considerably slowing down vehicles.
In fact, a traffic speed survey conducted by researchers from R.V. College of Engineering showed that traffic speed was 12-15 kmph in a 5km radius of Vidhana Soudha, where construction activity is now a constant. Contributing to the problem are delays by civic agencies in completing some projects. Take the stretch of Cubbon Road which has been closed since a year and Magrath Road that has been left dug up for the last three years.
The poor condition of the road and drainage near the Residency Road-Brigade Road junction often causes flash floods and inevitably, congestion. Left with no option the traffic police is trying to come up with short term solutions. “We have tried to decongest Vellara Junction by banning the right turn to Richmond Road. Since vehicles from Lifestyle junction now don’t need to wait for vehicles taking the right turn to Richmond Road the congestion will automatically come down,” says Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) M.A. Saleem, revealing that another lane will be introduced on MG Road between Queen’s statue and Anil Kumble Circle to divert traffic from MG Road and St Mark’s Road over the next few days to ease conditions here as well.
“The one-way trial on Bannerghatta Road may have not worked, but we are removing three right turns near Jalbhavan to decongest it,” the officer adds.