Mumbai: The approach road to the Lower Parel rail overbridge (ROB) from Currey Road station will be opened to pedestrians by Friday morning. The decision was taken after a joint inspection of the bridge by officials from the Western Railway (WR), Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), traffic police, and local elected representatives. The pedestrian section of the ROB will still be out of limits.
After the ROB was deemed unfit for pedestrians and vehicular traffic, the approach road was also shut down, leading to pedestrians having to use the solitary staircase to access the station’s old foot overbridge (FOB). This almost led to a stampede-like situation on Tuesday. The WR has since made provisions to provide greater access to the new foot overbridge to ensure the crowd is equally distributed.
WR officials said they are trying to ensure that crowd is equally distributed between two ROBs. “We are proposing to make the old FOB uni-directional during peak hours. In the morning, pedestrians will be allowed to go from east to west and in the evening, it will be open for people to cross over from the west to the east. We also want to divert pedestrians to the new FOB, which is wider and has more carrying capacity,” a senior official said.
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Railway officials also said they will not be fining people for using the FOBs without a ticket. Unlike stations such as Andheri and Santacruz, Lower Parel does not have a FOB built by the BMC. Pedestrians without a ticket are using the ROB’s footpath.
A joint team comprising engineers from the WR and the BMC and headed by the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, had declared the ROB unsafe. According to railway officials, the bridge will take at least two years to build.