CHENNAI: The city's roads will soon to have a common template for how space is shared between vehicles, pedestrians, trees, public transport, utilities and drainage, with the Chennai Unified Metropolitan Transport Authority (CUMTA) preparing a set of Street Design Guidelines that it expects all government departments to follow.
The draft guidelines are now under discussion among departments and are expected to be released in the next four to six weeks, according to a senior CUMTA official.
The proposal is aimed at addressing a basic problem in the city's infrastructure planning. Different agencies build different pieces of the same street without a common design governing how they should fit together.
The officials acknowledged that several provisions already exist in Indian Roads Congress guidelines and in earlier guidelines issued by different agencies.
The difference, according to CUMTA, is that the requirements are currently spread across different documents and practices.
CUMTA is attempting to bring them together in one comprehensive, road-width-wise format, after studying existing guidelines as well as practices in major Indian cities and internationally.
The official said the proposed framework is also expected to acquire legal backing through the government notification. “Once the GO is issued, it will become the rule,” he said.
The draft divides roads into widths ranging from 9 metres to 60 metres, with different requirements for local streets, collector streets, sub-arterial roads and arterial roads.
It has a checklist of street elements that can be accommodated for each road width, including footpaths, cycle tracks, tree corridors, medians, service lanes, public transport infrastructure, Metro, parking and multi-utility zones.
“The road could be 36m on paper, but houses have come up on top of the road. Once that happens, creating the road later means relocation and substantial expenditure. The proposed framework is intended to prevent that by ensuring that the road network identified during planning is actually protected through subsequent development,” the official added, explaining why CUMTA has put the requirements into a single checklist.
Under the proposed approach, the carriageway, footpath, utility space and stormwater drain would be positioned in relation to one another so that water naturally moves towards the drain.
CUMTA has earmarked one metre specifically as a tree corridor in the road cross-section.
A 12-metre local street such as Conron Smith road and Prakasam salai for instance, has a six-metre carriageway with two lanes, two-metre footpaths on either side and one-metre tree corridors on both sides, without on-street parking.
The framework would primarily guide new assets and future works, while existing streets could be brought under it when major projects alter their geometry.