Wednesday, March 26, 2008

The BRT corridor of death, confusion and traffic jams

The title just summarizes the three basic flaws in the construction of the BRT(for the ignorant ones this is Bus Rapid Transit corridor dedicated to high capacity, low floor buses to ply between Ambedkar Nagar and Moolchand). These flaws are not something that you need to look for explicitly but they make themselves visible to your eyes as soon as you step into this corridor.

Many deaths have taken place on this stretch from the time the work on this corridor has started. Mostly because people in delhi are just not used to seeing dividers in the middle of the road. Thus making the divider a frequent place for accidents to take place. This has been covered widely in the newspapers and is expected to reduce as people become familiar with this idea. But this is not why I am writing this post!!!!

Now lets look at the single most reason why I hate this stretch. I used to go to my college everyday on this stretch and found it one of the most congestion free roads making it my preferred way to college. Since the time of starting this project till today I have my usage of this road by almost 60-70%. The reason??? Traffic Jams. Yes, I, like everybody else, hate traffic jams. The road has now been divided into two lanes and in one of the lanes you cant even overtake and in the second lane you need to be a little experienced driver to do so. Leading to single lines of vehicles stretching upto 1 km(Yes I have witnessed this and missed 2 classes of 1 hour each due to this jam). The earlier scene was such that you could easily have 4 vehicles standing and moving side by side and hence there was no chance of a traffic jam, but now every now and then there is a traffic jam.

Why were these corridors created in the first place. These corridors were proposed uring the time when blueline buses were on a rampage on delhi roads, but is this a solution??
Still the same drivers will be driving these buses. The bus-stops are in the middle of the road calling for more accidents.

I fail to see even a single reason as to why such huge amount of money was spent on this project. Instead of solving a problem it raises more problems. All our tax-payers money spent on creating traffic jams and more accidents. Looks like good use of our money.

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