HALF FLYOVER PUNJABI BAGH & RAJA GARDEN – Two flyovers and twice the mess

August 5, 2014

The Times of India (Delhi)Neha Lalchandani & Somreet Bhattacharya

TNN

In the second part of our series on half flyovers, we look at the ones at Punjabi Bagh and Raja Garden, next to each other, for which PWD is appointing a consultant to find a solution. The road can’t be widened and the traffic volume is huge

Two half flyovers on Ring Road near Punjabi Bagh stopped serving their purpose of easing traffic a few years ago. At present, the two flyovers, at a distance of about 500m along the same road, create chaos rather than streamline the traffic. Due to severe congestion and poor road engineering, gridlocks have become a routine affair on this stretch.The public works department will shortly be appointing a consultant who will suggest what kind of interventions are needed to ease the traffic flow along this road. This may include building parallel flyovers along both the existing ones.Built about 15 yearsBuilt about 15 years back, the flyovers were intended to solve the traffic jams on this road due to several red lights. However, the traffic has since then increased many times and the flyovers are just and the flyovers are just not sufficient to cater to the demand.

Traffic cops say that more than eight lakh vehicles pass through this stretch daily. As this huge mass crosses the Najafgarh drain, Ring Road takes a sharp right turn towards the Raja Garden half flyover and the road width gets

reduced to three lanes because of a CNG pump located on the edge of the road.
Scores of autorickshaws and trucks edge their way onto the

main carriageway , eating into almost an entire lane and leading to the first bottleneck.

Once the vehicles manage to weave their way through this mess, they find themselves suddenly on the three-lane flyover over Punjabi Bagh Club which descends into four lanes

on Ring Road, the extreme left lane joining in from under the flyover.
The merging traffic

struggles for space for the next few hundred metres till it arrives at a red light below the half flyover coming from the Punjabi Bagh crossing on the other side of the road. The red light is at the Moti Bagh crossing.

The other flyover, coming from the opposite direction over the Moti Bagh crossing, is another traffic nightmare.

The traffic, which has been moving on a four-lane road having descended from a two-way flyover over Punjabi Bagh suddenly finds the road divided with two lanes continuing straight and the other two lanes going down on the left towards the residential areas. The volume of this traffic is huge, says traffic police, and this half flyover is just not sufficient to handle the current load.

PWD officials say there are several reasons for the congestion which include a Ramlila Ground nearby and the Metro Phase-III construction along this road. “A new station will come up here and arrangements need to be made for multi modal transport. Widening the road does not seem possible right now due to location of a cremation ground next to the Najafgarh drain, dense residential areas on the other side and markets. There are also a lot of trees along this stretch even in the middle of the road which are a potential traffic hazard. “We have carried out some surface improvement but that has not helped. A drastic change will be needed and we will implement what the consultant recommends,“ said an official.