JOIN USCrores of rupees spent on constructing the country’s second largest flyover seems to have yielded little results as traffic congestion has become a norm on the Electronics City flyover.
The elevated roadway, built to bail out the IT sector employees from traffic snarls, appears to be incapacitated by the growing traffic of the City as there is severe traffic jam during peak hours.
The main reasons are the lack of traffic monitoring and relatively narrow roads leading to the Silk Board.
Complaints and dissatisfactions are growing among commuters as their smooth drive has been converted to one filled with interruptions.
The estimated Rs 775-crore project had promised to bring down the travel time between Silk Board and Electronics City from one hour to seven-nine minutes, given the 80 kmph speed limit on the flyover.
Ramesh, a commuter, said: “In the past five days, I was forced to wait for 20 minutes twice, defeating the whole purpose of the flyover. This, even after paying such a high toll fee. Further, there is none to monitor traffic flow. The situation is so bad, it ends up causing a jam right in the middle of the flyover.”
Almost every alternate day, traffic movement is disrupted on the entire stretch of the flyover for up to 30 minutes, complained frequent users. Most of the jams occur, while heading back from Hosur to Bangalore, towards the Silk Board junction.
Lakshminarayan, Traffic Police Inspector at the Madivala station, said: “Traffic jams are bound to be more towards our end of the flyover. The number of commuters is relatively high and the roads leading off the flyover, such as at BTM Layout are very narrow.”
Further absence of smart card system consumes a lot of time at the toll gate. Daily commuters who have an electronic reading bar code save time. But other commuters use a normal daily pass, which reportedly takes four-five minutes at the toll gate itself.
Apparently, the expensive dream flyover isn’t living up to its expectations.