Anyone leaving Salt Lake from Chingrihata during rush hour knows what a pain it can be. Precious minutes are wasted staring out of the window as traffic comes to a crawl.
Considering the additional vehicles that will head in and out of the township during the Book Fair, the authorities have been tweaking the system to ease the congestion.
The Salt Lake Bypass, which connects EM Bypass to Salt Lake, Sector V, and New Town through the Chingrihata area, has several ongoing infrastructural projects. The construction of the New Garia-Airport Metro line, for instance, has reduced the width of this road drastically.
These bottlenecks are located on both the EM Bypass-bound as well as New Town-bound flank of the Nicco Park crossing and at the base of the Chingrighata flyover near Sukantanagar.
The Salt Lake bypass is a threelane wide double carriageway with a median divider running in the middle. The road is smooth and vehicles can maintain a moderately fast speed along it but the bottlenecks slow down traffic and snarls are commonplace.
Moreover, with the International Kolkata Book Fair slated to continue till the end of the month, thousands of visitors are expected to head towards the Karunamoyee grounds from across the city as well as its outskirts. In a bid to ease the situation, the Bidhannagar Commissionerate’s traffic wing has been holding meetings with all stakeholders, including those from Nabadiganta Industrial Township Authority (NDITA) and Metro Railway.
“We have asked them to speed up their work and have also discussed how barricades can be removed or adjusted in a way that maximum amount of road space can be utilised by vehicles and logjams can get minimised,” said a police officer.
Thereafter a portion of the median divider near the Chingrighata crossing has already been reduced in width and the stretch from the Sukantanagar intersection to the Chingrighata crossing near VIP Sweets has been widened.
An official from Metro Railways said they have regular interaction with traffic police officers on the ground and barricades that are crucial for the ongoing construction work of Metro pillars are often realigned once work on the particular stretch is over.
“This is done to free up space for vehicles and is undertaken based on requests and inputs that we receive from the police. We are trying to see whether more space can be freed up to handle the surge in the number of vehicles expected during the Book Fair,” said the Metro official.
Eye on Metro future
Once complete, the 32km corridor from New Garia to the airport will be Calcutta’s longest Metro line. But that seems a distant future. A truncated 5.4km stretch between New Garia and Ruby, the first phase of the project, received a nod from the commissioner of railway safety in February last year but it has yet to see commercial runs.
Metro general manager P. Uday Kumar Reddy said the New Garia-Ruby stretch should be operational by March 2024. “Some signaling work is pending. It should be completed soon,” he said.
Land logjams have been delaying the project since it started in 2011. The Orange Line was supposed to have been extended to Sector V by the end of October last year. Reddy said the Sector V extension is now unlikely before December 2024. The line was supposed to have been extended till City Centre 2 in December 2024 but even that is virtually impossible now, sources said.
The extension till City Centre 2 will take at least six months from when the line reaches Sector V, said another official.
Land logjams in New Town and along VIP Road are major challenges in the 3.5km stretch between City Centre 2 and the airport and the commencement of Metro service would reduce the pressure. “A realistic estimation of when the line would reach the airport can only be given once it reaches City Centre 2,” said the official.