Highways dept commences study to decongest 3 arterial corridors in city

In a step towards decongesting the arterial stretches, the State Highways department has commenced a

comprehensive study of three heavily congested corridors including Halda junction to Adyar on Sardar Patel Road to Light House via Adyar and Greenways road.

“We have appointed consultants to carry out comprehensive study of the entire corridors from Halda

Junction – Adyar on Sardar Patel Road to Greenways road to Light House via Santhome Road, Chinnamalai to Velachery Bypass near Phoenix Market City and Vadapalani junction to Porur via

Arcot road. 

There are multiple bottlenecks along these corridors and we trying to find a comprehensive solution to decongest the entire stretch,” a senior official of the Highways department told DT Next.

Until now, the Highways department had always conducted a feasibility study on a specific project

like construction of a flyover or grade separator on a junction or bottle traffic neck. “Hereafter, for

all the future projects, we are going to do corridor-wise study to decongest instead of focusing on junction- wise. Because now if we construct a flyover or grade separator on one junction, the traffic piles up in next one. So we are going study the overall corridor to find out what are the solutions required in various bottlenecks of the stretch. The solutions could be anything from elevated road to multiple flyovers or an alternative road. We will implement it in a phased manner,” the official said.

For example, the official noted that the Halda junction to Adyar stretch of the Sardar Patel road

have multiple bottle necks like Raj Bhavan, Cancer Institute and Madhya Kailash. “We will try to

find a comprehensive study,” the official said.

K P Subramaniam, a former professor of Urban engineering of Anna University said that comprehensive study of traffic decongestion is always better than piecemeal approach. “We require

a holistic approach, that is, instead of developing one junction we should develop the entire area.

What happens now is construction of a flyover on one intersection leads to congestion in the next

junction,” he said, adding that however construction of the flyover is only a short-term solution. “We require long term solution to decongest roads. It can be achieved only by promoting the public transport system so that the people shut their cars and bikes thereby reducing traffic snarls,” he said.