Elevated corridor fails to ease traffic snarls at Dwarka

NASHIK: It's been nine months since the iconic elevated corridor on the Mumbai-Agra national highway which passes through the city was inaugurated, but there is still no respite from the daily traffic chaos at the Dwarka junction lying on the intersection of the Nashik-Pune highway and the national highway.
The project had boisterously been touted by officials and politicians alike as the ultimate deliverance from traffic chaos at various traffic junctions like the Mumbai Naka, Dwarka and Adgaon Naka - it was being claimed that the 6.1-km elevated corridor would enables traffic on the national highway to bypass the city traffic thereby reducing traffic congestion in the city.
And while the corridor has provided relief at some junctions, there has been little change in the situation at the Dwarka junction where daily traffic snarls continue unabated. The pedestrian subway created at the junction is of no help either as pedestrians prefer crossing the six lanes of dense traffic instead of using the subway. Traffic signals are installed, but have not yet been made operational. The signals have been perpetually put on the 'blinker mode', which serve no purpose.
Dwarka junction lies on the arterial road that connects Nashik city with the Nashik Road railway station, located around 8km away. Hence, apart from vehicles arriving and departing from Nashik to Pune, the daily traffic of vehicles carrying railway passengers in autorickshaws, the Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation buses, taxies and private vehicles adds to the volume of traffic considerably. Besides, the road connecting Dwarka to Bytco junction (towards the railway station) is still a four-lane road (plans are on to convert it into a six-lane road). Another reason for the constant traffic congestion is that vehicles, especially heavy ones carrying goods from the Ambad industrial area of the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) and bound towards Malegaon-Dhule-Agra, have not been provided access to the new corridor. These vehicles have to use the service road provided for city traffic till the Dwarka junction, from where they can use to ramp to reach the elevated corridor. This adds to the traffic problem at Dwarka junction.
Besides, the huge round-about at the centre of the junction leaves little space for vehicles to move; there are plans to reduce it to facilitate an additional lane.
Ramps have been provided to ascend or descend the elevated corridor, but there are huge traffic islands between the main carriageway below the corridor and the service roads, which are encroached upon by hawkers. The service roads too are encroached by hawkers and are widely used by public to park vehicles.
When the Rs 940-crore project was inaugurated on June 14, 2013 by Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar and chief minister Prithviraj Chavan, it was termed as a landmark achievement that would liberate the city from traffic jams. While there were demands from various quarters to name the bridge after prominent personalities, the National Highways Authority of India rejected them, saying it was against its policy to do so. The Nashik Municipal Corporation, however, passed a resolution in its general body meeting to demand that the corridor be named after Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. There has been no official nod on the matter yet.
The deficiencies in the project came to the fore eventually and additional works worth Rs 54 crore have been planned to modify the corridor. They include providing two access points to vehicles exiting the Ambad MIDC area, reducing the roundabout at Dwarka, doing away with traffic islands separating the service roads and providing additional underpasses at various points. There have been demands for more underpasses and flyovers at various locations. In locations between Mumbai Naka and Garware Point, pedestrians, including school students, continue risking their lives. In absence of crossover points, they dodge vehicles running at high speeds to cross the elevated corridor. There was also some issue about strengthening some pillars of the elevated corridor near the Adgaon naka which was taken up.
All these problems have raised questions over the manner in which the project was planned at the first place.
While the six-laning of the Dwarka-Bytco stretch of the Nashik-Pune road has also been separately planned by the government and additional works under 'change of scope' are being undertaken by the NHAI, citizens have no choice but to wait some more to get respite from the traffic chaos they have to suffer from daily, which appears to be at the mercy of the trial and error methods resorted by the authorities concerned.