Road to Nowhere

Infrastructure is the coffee table discussion topic these days. Roads take the major portion of it. With everyone eying a bigger and better car, it is expected. Of course, oil has been a great dampener, but still! With all the talks notwithstanding, are we building enough roads? Well, as far as I can see, not really, we need to speed up the road construction activity multiple times and not just by a few percentage points!

But, that is not the point that I wanted to make. I wanted to focus on one critical aspect of the highway system, the access points. I believe having right access control policies and rules will allow us to consolidate our existing highways and build further on that base. Without one such policy, we may squander away what we got and may get caught in typical two step forward one step back syndrome.

All of you who traveled between Chandigarh and Delhi by road must have come across two massive flyovers one in Panipat and the other in Zirakpur. Do you know why these two flyovers are being built? No, the flyovers are not just for the intersections, the flyovers actually cross the entire congested stretch of the city. Central Government agreed to foot the bill to take the national highway on pillars and leave the earlier highway for city traffic. In Panipat the highway was elevated for a good 3.4 kms. I can bet, as Panipat stretches, which it will along the highway, the stretches of highway around which the new colonies and new commercial areas come, will again double up as city street, till the long route traffic comes to a halt in those stretches, prompting another outcry for yet another flyover and so on.

The above scenario is not specific to a city but is being played out across the length and breadth of the country. Almost all the cities and towns thru which highways pass, simply start using these highways as city streets. There are as many entry and exit points into the highway system as the City / Town deems necessary. Shops come up along both sides of the highway system with each individual shop having a direct entry/exit to the highway system!

To ensure that we have a credible highway system, we got to regulate entry and exit points of the system. Any populated area (City/Town/Village) that wants access to the highway system, must do so at some predetermined point(s). Depending on the size of the populated area, the number of entry and exit points should be determined.

The only way highway system should be tapped is by building clover leaves to the highway. The populated area that wants to access the highway system must pay for creating the entry exit infrastructure. There must not be any direct entry into the highway system.

The key to success of such an access policy is that the local government bodies must plan their City/Town such that the population is not just dependent on the highway system for their intercity transport needs. The urban / rural planning departments must not accept any outlay that does not have city streets for the intercity transport and that does not have well defined regulated access to the highway.

I don’t think it is prudent for us as a nation to spend money on building elevated highway system when the one on ground perfectly suffices, if only we could manage it properly!