The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : More flyovers or elevated expressways?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jun 05, 2007
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

More flyovers or elevated expressways?

R. Sujatha and L. Srikrishna

CHENNAI : Are flyovers the best solution to cut traffic congestion? Opinion is divided on the question. Most road-users are happy to zip across a junction using a flyover but entry and exit points are still difficult to navigate.

According to Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Sunil Kumar, flyovers allow vehicles to reach their destinations faster. The signal cycle too gets divided into two as vehicles moving straight take the flyover, while those taking a right or left use the road below.

Considering Chennai's vehicle population of about 25 lakh, flyovers connect key roads and help to ease traffic bottlenecks, said a traffic police officer on Anna Salai.

A member of the Automobile Association of Southern India expressed concern over the widening gap between poor infrastructure and mushrooming vehicle numbers. An efficient public transport system could also bring down the pressure on the roads.

Pre-fabricated

Experts in transport management feel it is time Chennai got elevated expressways for high-speed traffic like Pune, Nagpur and Bangalore. These expressways can be prefabricated and will not take much time to build compared to flyovers. They will allow high-speed traffic to make rapid point-to-point travel around the city, just like bypass roads.

The nine mini-flyovers built on arterial roads during the previous term of the DMK government have not helped decongest traffic to the extent they were envisaged, as in some stretches entry to the service lanes has been either prevented or restricted, say experts.

"Mini flyovers must ease traffic at junctions. The immediate aim is mobility," says M.S. Srinivasan, former chief engineer of Highways. But allowing commercial development around these flyovers without providing enough road space for commuters has defeated the purpose, he says.

A simulated study of traffic congestion in Chennai in 2001 by the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras showed that the average speed of a vehicle was 15 km/hour. "The average speed of vehicle movement may have dropped to 10 km per hour now. This will mean more congestion, stress and revenue loss," says R. Sivanandan, professor, Transportation Engineering Division, Department of Civil Engineering, IIT, who guided the study.

Using the then prevalent traffic pattern, the study analysed the traffic flow if expressways were constructed along important junctions, linking the entry points to the city. It found that during peak hour, there would be a 27 per cent reduction in the total system travel time (for the entire stretch) and drastically reduced pollution, fuel consumption, and driver stress.

"This means the cost of construction of expressways could be recovered in a few years. As the findings are on the conservative side, the benefits could be much more given the increase in traffic density in the past six years," Dr. Sivanandan says.

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