For the past few days, thousands of commuters travelling on Jubilee Hills-Begumpet-CTO stretch have been pleasantly surprised to experience faster traffic movement despite obvious bottlenecks at Shyamlal and Jabbar buildings at Begumpet.
Travel time on the extremely busy stretch — on which over four lakh vehicles ply daily in a single direction on an average — was considerably reduced by changing traffic signal light timings at the Jubilee Hills check-post junction. In what is described as a dynamic approach by Traffic Police Additional Commissioner C.V. Anand, this crowded stretch falling in three different traffic police stations was treated as one sector instead of managing traffic police station wise. Inspectors of Banjara Hills, Punjagutta and Begumpet traffic police stations are now continuously interacting with each other to identify choking points and clear vehicles. Crackdown on parking of vehicles on the main road too has helped in an uninterrupted flow.
Yet, it was the small change of altering the time cycle of signals at the check-post junction which did wonders. “It was noticed that flow of traffic was high from CTO to Jubilee Hills in the morning so, we changed the 60-second time for green signal to 99 seconds from 8.30 a.m. to 11 a.m.,” explained Mr. Anand.
Similarly, the signal time was changed in the evening in the reverse direction. If 40 vehicles piled up in a row before a junction, the green signal used to turn red by the time 20th vehicle moved past the signal post with each vehicle taking two to three seconds to move. This is leading to the next half of commuters to fret and fume.
And there was chaos with loud honking whenever someone tried to jump the signal and bumping into other streams of vehicles. Now, the extra time for the green signal is helping clear all the vehicles in one direction in a single cycle, he pointed out.
To make the vehicles flow even faster, a traffic policeman was posted at Chutney's – another choking point near Punjagutta — to prevent even single lane parking in front. But, GHMC's delay in clearing the Begumpet bottlenecks continues to hamper the traffic movement.
