Citizens’ protest against building more and more flyovers to ease urban traffic congestion have mostly come to nothing. Though these flyovers, after consuming huge funds, take you back to square one (the traffic jams return) after a few years, they continue to be built. The illusion that they will deliver you from traffic jams caused by the huge rise in private road transport never dies.
The latest such project to draw out citizens’ protest is a proposed huge 6.7-km six-lane steel flyover (they are built quicker than concrete ones) at a cost of over Rs 1,300 crore to link Chalukya Circle to the Hebbal crossing in Bengaluru so that it gets a bit easier to commute between the city and its airport which is a good 37 km away.
The key issue is that traffic at Bengaluru’s Kempegowda airport is growing at a massive 20-per cent-plus a year and the prosperity that this underlines is adding private cars at an unbearable pace. Citizens groups (a petition on change.org against the flyover has drawn 36,000 supports) are saying that what the new flyover will do is simply shift the traffic jams to its two ends, which will negate the time saved by cars being able to speed down the flyover once they are on it.
Worse, the jams that the flyover will cause at Hebbal, already the end of another flyover complex, will beat present jams hollow. Worst of all, the jams at the Chalyukya circle end will bring them right to the doorsteps of the Vidhana Soudha (state Legislative Assembly) and the Raj Bhavan. This is like ending a flyover at Delhi’s Vijay Chowk, making it difficult for the President’s motorcade to pass through!
The existing flyover complex at Hebbal was built to ease traffic flows. Then when serious jams returned after a time, a lane was added to the flyover. But the efficacy of that has now disappeared. If the new flyover is built, cars will get off one flyover and get on to another and have to negotiate horrific jams on the little stretch in between the two.
To the pointless and folly of the whole exercise has to be added the environmental cost of having to cut down over 800 trees to make way for the construction. The “air-conditioned city”, as Bengaluru used to be called, already has summer temperatures nudging 40 degrees. How much worse can it get if you keep cutting down more and more trees to make way for more and more flyovers and wider roads to carry more and more automotive traffic spewing more and more exhaust?
There is of course a right way (or may be two) to go about reducing, if not eliminating, traffic jams. V Ravichandar, chief of Feedback Consulting, who was a key figure in Bangalore Agenda Task Force that, over a decade ago, played a pioneering role in promote public-private partnership for a better quality of life in the city, says one solution is to have far more buses (the city already has by Indian standards a superior airport bus service) with depots in key city hubs. If you have a good comfortable and reliable airport bus service running at 10-minute intervals, then the urge to use a car for an airport trip will go down. Another solution is to develop an alternative access to the airport road so as to avoid the Hebbal crossing. This way not all the airport traffic will use a single city entry-exit point at Hebbal.
But perhaps the best solution which has been studiously avoided all these years is to use the existing rail network in and around the city which can take you almost to the doorstep of the airport. All the four corners of the city are connected by rail to Yelahanka station from where Devanahalli station (on the Bengaluru-Hyderabad line) is just as short hop. The only major task to make this a workable solution will be to construct a 4 km road link (station to airport) that can be used for airport transfers.
A lead story in this paper in 2008 spoke about this incredible solution, which would have cost a mere Rs 100 crore to put in place (the 4-km last-mile link would be extra), but was not being looked at. Instead, the highway to Hyderabad was upgraded and made into a toll road, which everyone now has to use to access the airport.
Railway officials, quoted in the story, said, we don’t look at intra-city connectivity unless the state government wants to sit with us to devise a joint solution. And politicians who run the state are always more interested in road projects and flyovers (several elevated stretches have been built in the last few years on the present airport road) which involved awarding of contracts.
The great pity is that among Indian cities, Bengaluru has a most well-informed and robust civil society. Yet, its ability to influence policy along the right lines at times seems so limited.
subirkroy@gmail.com
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