After more than five years, buses of the Metropolitan Transport Corporation have started using the Anna Bus Terminus facility along Grand Southern Trunk Road in West Tambaram. The move comes in the wake of the drive against encroachments launched by Tambaram Municipality along with Law and Order and Traffic Wings at Tambaram. Besides, to ease congestion in bottleneck spots in the town, police and municipal authorities removed mobile shops around the terminus and also prohibited the parking of private vehicles inside the terminus.
The move was initiated in the third week of June. Only MTC buses, though only a few services are allowed to use the facility. Tambaram police sources said that buses on four routes originating from West Tambaram- 1B, (Tiruvotriyur); M21 (Velachery); C 51 (Adyar); and V 51 (T.Nagar) are allowed to park inside the terminus. According to the officials, the terminus has parking space for seven to eight buses inside the terminus.
The Anna Bus Terminus, a couple of decades ago, was the only facility for buses originating from Tambaram and operating to several farflung villages such as Ponmar, Keerapakkam, Nallambakkam, Somangalam, Manimangalam, Agaram Then, Mappedu, Karanai, and Vengaivaasal and others to halt.
With the explosion in number of services, the terminus was hardly used and began to serve as a private parking lot. M. Karikalan, Municipal Chairman, said considering the huge number of MTC services passing through the town and also originating from here, facilities for parking the buses were comparatively less.
Bottleneck on arterial road
With buses parked on the carriageway of GST Road, the arterial road became a bottleneck at this point and hence they decided to park at least a few number of buses inside the terminus.
Police said there was marginal improvement in the flow of traffic, in the absence of mobile shops around the terminus. The shops were allowed to function at a little distance away.
They had also put an end to the parking of long distance buses operated by private transport services near the entrance to Tambaram railway station, policemen added.
More than 6,000 services (single trips of MTC) pass through the town everyday and only the construction of a modern integrated bus terminus on lines of Chennai Mofussil Bus Terminus in Koyambedu could put a permanent end to these problems.
Unless the government creates a permanent, modern and integrated terminus on the lines of Chennai Mofussil Bus Terminus at Koyambedu, there will be no solution to the traffic-related problems in Tambaram, is the uniform opinion among all residents and elected representatives in Tambaram. The absence of a terminus has been causing a chain of problems.
Frequent accidents
Frequent accidents, both minor and fatal, and traffic snarls, are all a daily affair in and around Tambaram.Peerkankaranai, where government buses originating from Koyambedu reach after travelling on Chennai Bypass, too has become a big mess, especially during evening rush hours. Motorists spend a considerable amount of time to get past Tambaram and Perungalathur while travelling towards Chengalpattu.
With the Ministry of Defence hardly cooperating with the State Government for parting with land for crucial basic infrastructure projects, it was high time the State Government came up with alternate schemes to provide solutions to transport related problems in the southern suburbs of Chennai. The attitude of the Ministry was the single most important reason for development projects to be delayed, the residents pointed out, while speaking to Downtown .
