Every time a bus moves on the service road on the northern side of the Ondipudur flyover, a cloud of thick dust gets kicked up leaving motorists, pedestrians and others present there with a coating of dust on their faces. This repeats when the bus takes the road on the southern end to move towards the Singanallur Junction.
“A motorist just cannot ride behind the bus as the dust forces him or her to close the eyes,” says M. Sulaiman, a resident of Shanmuga Layout. He uses the road on a daily basis. For hotelier P. Ramachandran it is a question of livelihood as the dust enters his small hotel challenging the cooking process on the hygiene front. “I find it difficult to keep away the dust.”
Mr. Ramachandran’s plight is worse than Mr. Sulaiman’s because around 600 buses take the service road for a ‘U’ turn to pass through his shop in a day. For people like Sulaiman the trouble is only when they are trailing a bus, though.
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The solution lies in laying a new road and that too a concrete one, say Mr. Sulaiman, Mr. Ramachandran and other residents. The present road is full of potholes. The drain next to it is filled with debris, plastics and other waste.
A. Abdul Salam of Stanes Colony says that there was a semblance of a road when the city hosted the World Classical Tamil Conference. But the road soon gave way because it was not a pucca road. If at all the authorities concerned were to lay a new road it should be of concrete.
Aside from the road, the residents complain that they are facing a new challenge in the form of debris, which is being dumped there almost on a daily basis at unearthly hours. The debris beneath the flyover will prevent the flow of rain water and result in stagnation, affecting movement of residents of over a dozen residential colonies.
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S.M. Samy, Ward 61 Councillor and a former Chairman of the East Zone, Coimbatore Corporation, says that when the Corporation came forward to take up the maintenance of the road during his chairmanship, the civic body was told that the road was under the State Highways Department for maintenance. But nothing much happened thereafter.
He says that if at all the Department comes forward to lay a road it should be concrete for three reasons – concrete roads will better withstand the movement of heavy vehicles, it will be easy to lay concrete beneath the bridge and when rain water comes gushing down from the pipes beneath the bridge, it will not wither away as easily as a bitumen-topped road.
Mr. Samy says that he is with the residents in demanding street lights in the area as the presence of a liquor outlet and men in inebriated condition on the steps leading to the flyover trouble women residents.