Over the years, the Ambalamukku junction has become a traffic hot spot, what with school buses negotiating the narrow roads, motorists looking to beat the yellow traffic light to get across signal points, and a steady river of pedestrians trying to wade through all this or just waiting for buses.
However, if anyone thinks all this works according to some pre-arranged schedule, they are wrong. Those transiting the Ambalamukku-NCC Nagar road may even be forgiven if they get hysterical on these issues; for years now, they have put up with bad roads and each burst in the drinking water pipelines in the area worsens the road conditions.
The fact that one of the roads leads to a private hospital also seems to be lost on the powers that be who are tasked with ensuring that the people get a fair deal for their tax money.
Just an afterthought - how many such officials regularly use the road?
The Plamood-PMG one-way is that rare road in the city which witnesses bottlenecks only if there is some huge protest happening near the Assembly. Otherwise, it has been smooth sailing on this road. But of late, a few potholes have made commuting through this road an ordeal.
Large pits have formed at three locations in the past few months. This being an incline with sharp curves, many drivers are regularly caught unawares and land on one of the potholes with a thud.
Some of these stretch across the entire width of the road making them an unavoidable peril.
There aren’t too many places in the city that school students can be taken for a day-long excursion, fewer still that would appeal to a kindergartener. The ‘doll museum’ at the Kerala State Council for Child Welfare is one such favourite destination. But when more than one school descends on the council’s office building at the same time, the road here, which leads from the Music College junction to the Government College of Teacher Education, becomes impassable.
Last Friday, motorists come to near-blows here following a traffic jam that resulted from too many school buses being parked or attempting to park in front of the council office. One bus could not move until every child had safely disembarked. Another was parked on the side, virtually eliminating half the already narrow road space. All this, during morning rush hour.
There was a Student Police Cadet function at the council, which added to the traffic. It took a while for some semblance of order to return, but a council official said this was not an everyday occurrence.
(Reporting by
G. Mahadevan,
S.R. Praveen, and
Kaavya Pradeep Kumar)
