When the sleepy Old Mahabalipuram Road turned into the IT Expressway in the early 2000s, the city reinvented itself to be the metropolis that it is now.
Now, the already congested six-lane IT Expressway is all set to turn futuristic. If the project takes shape, then there will be a four-lane elevated road and above that will be the elevated corridor of Metro Rail — right from Taramani to Siruseri, for a distance of over 17 km over the Expressway.
This cutting edge infrastructure project has come about after the Chennai Metro Rail Limited (CMRL) and the Tamil Nadu Road Development Company (TNRDC) came to an understanding.
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The first phase of the elevated road that will run from SRP Tools junction to Siruseri will be at a height of 5.5 metres from the road and Metro Rail will be 4.5 metre above that. The six-lane road, which became a toll facility in December 2008 with some 63,000 vehicles using the road on an average every day at that time, now has over 1.30 lakh vehicles plying on it daily.
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According to TNRDC officials, the project was proposed six years ago and the detailed project report has been submitted to the State government which is in the process of working out the funding pattern.
The elevated road, which is likely to be taken up first among the two projects, would be 17.2 km long and will take two years to complete. “As far as possible, we are looking at pre-fab structures so as to reduce time of construction and also since we cannot take much road space during the work,” the official said.
According to Chennai Metro Rail Limited (CMRL) officials, they have decided to have an elevated corridor along the six-lane road since it has enough width and would be easier to complete construction. This stretch running to about 22 km will cover 22 stations including Tidel Park, Perungudi, Okkiyampet, Infosys, Sathyabhama University, Siruseri and SIPCOT.
“That corridor has a huge IT population commuting. Hence we decided to incorporate it in Phase II,” an official said.
Short-term solutions
In Phase I project of Chennai Metro Rail too a flyover was constructed below the viaduct at Vadapalani; but it took almost six years to complete it. Gitakrishnan Ramadurai, a member of the Transport Engineering faculty at IIT-Madras said, “It takes 8-10 years to construct such projects. It is important to have transit-oriented development for Chennai Metro Rail to be successful. Since Metro Rail may take long and demand would be less without transit oriented development, in the short term, bus rapid transit may be a cost-effective solution.”
A traffic planner said that lack of grid development along the road has led to vehicles being forced to use the main carriageway and the service lanes wherever possible. “There are no proper roads connecting to the ECR, which is just over a kilometre away. That road could take on some of the OMR traffic. Only those motorists who don’t mind taking small internal roads and know the routes take them to reach ECR,” he said.