The public works department (PWD) has started repair works on the pothole-ridden VIP Road from Sunday night.
The 8-km stretch from Ultadanga to Jessore Road near airport’s gate number 1 of the artery that connects the airport with the rest of the city will get completely re-laid.
A PWD official said the existing surface of the entire stretch on both the airport bound as well as the city-bound flank would be first scraped off before a fresh layer of mastic asphalt is put in its place. This, the official said, is being done to ensure that there are no undulations on the road.
All over the city most roads have an undulating stretch as a result of patchwork repairs that result in an extremely bumpy ride.
For many years, all that VIP Road got was patchwork repairs that peeled off after a few spells of rain.
The Telegraph had reported on multiple occasions about the sorry state of the road that connects the city to the airport.
On Monday, a team of workmen had already scraped away a 200-m stretch of top layer of the airport-bound flank starting from near the Baguiati pedestrian subway complex till the Joramandir bus stop.
At night, the entire stretch is cordoned off as the workers re-lay the road using advanced road-laying machines.
A PWD officer said a German-made Gussasphalt mastic asphalt laying machine had been pressed into service on another stretch of VIP Road as part of a trial run. The results were “extremely satisfactory”, the officer added.
Vehicles headed to the airport are being diverted from the main carriageway of the VIP Road to a service lane and this was causing traffic snarls. “We have no choice but to divert the vehicles through the service lane,” said an officer of the Bidhannagar commissionerate’s traffic wing.
The same measure will be in place when the road on the Ultadanga-bound flank is re-laid.
Traffic is expected to be affected over the next couple of months on VIP Road before the repairs are complete.