Our city planners and engineers do have a sense of humor in designing our roads. While road widening is a phenomenon that is so widespread in our city today, there seems to be little thought or advice taken from traffic experts on how these should be designed. What we end up with is BOTTLENECKS.
Here's the Wikipedia Definition for starters:
Metaphorically a bottleneck is a section of a route with a carrying capacity substantially below that characterising other sections of the same route. This is often a narrow part of a road, perhaps also with a smaller number of lanes, or a reduction of the number of tracks of a railway line. It may be due to a narrow bridge or tunnel, a deep cutting or narrow embankment, or work in progress on part of the road or railway
When bottlenecks exist due to construction activity or due to a temporary situation like an accident, I think that is perfectly normal and understandable. What I do not get is many of roads have bottlenecks built into the design. This is going to be the way it is, for a long time. Oh, my, god!!
To me it sounds like common sense that when a road has 4 lanes (in India, our good people upgrade these to anywhere from 6-8 lanes on the fly) and as you get near a junction or because there is a structure spilling over from the pavment, the road suddenly has only 2 lanes. So, you have a situation where 6 parallel vehicles are trying to squeeze (or race) into these 2 lanes. This leads to compression as more and more vehicles try to squeeze through the narrow outlet. A great example of this is where you go under the KR Puram flyover as you leave the city.
Another very usual reason for a bottleneck is unusable lanes. These are caused by bad roads, manholes sticking out into the road, rubble on the streets, dirt piling up in the corners (and we don't want to dirty our tyres, see?)or most usually "on the street parking". Fixing the roads alone and making available all the lanes a road is supposed to have will make a huge difference.
I wonder what our planners do when they go and visit the US to "study" traffic management. My take is that they do not even have to go there. Just sit on your PC and login to Google Earth and "visit" all these cities. The latest renditions are so good that you can even go down to the street levels in large cities and check out the place. Why can we just just simply copy the US??
I pray that God gives all of us the courage to endure the madness, I pray that God give our planners some common sense to create good infra, I pray that God gives all of us traffic sense and the ability to be considerate to our fellow drivers. I pray that God makes horns disappear. Amen.
