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Satellite Town Marooned By Expressway

  • Squeezed by infrastructure works, residents find commuting downright dangerous.The Rs. 680-crore elevated expressway project on National Highway 7, designed ostensibly to ease the commute to the international airport, has virtually pulled the brakes on accessibility to one of the bustling residential areas it straddles.The only two exits for Yelahanka Satellite Town are now chaotic bottlenecks, one particularly dangerous as it involves a manned level crossing.

SNAKING QUEUES

  • The main exit — an approach road through the Allalasandra railway crossing — has gone from being four lanes wide to an unregulated two-lane road without a formal median.If the snaking queues of traffic are an inconvenience to commuters, it is downright risky for those manning the railway crossing as they have to physically contend with the scary traffic while operating the gates.
  • As for the second exit, through the Kogilu Cross, the construction of a flyover, again by the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI), has resulted in the diversion of highway traffic through Yelahanka, choking this narrow exit. “This is a classic case of one agency not knowing what the other is doing. The commute is chaotic, long and quite frankly frightening,” says Karthik Subramaniam, a resident of Yelahanka who works at the Manyata Tech Park in Nagavara.Indeed, the NHAI, the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) and the South Western Railway are holding each other accountable.R.K. Gupta, Regional Director of NHAI, told The Hindu the Allalasandra road is the BBMP's responsibility.

DOWNHILL ALL THE WAY

  • Admitting that conditions on the road had deteriorated over the last year and a half, senior officials of the BBMP's Byatarayanapura zone said the original plan to construct a railway under-bridge was scrambled by the expressway, and now it was up to the South Western Railway (SWR) to draw up a new proposal. A senior SWR official said the plan now is to have a railway over-bridge.

LONG WAIT

  • Assuming the expressway and flyover are built within the scheduled deadline of November 2012, residents have at least a 10-month wait before their ordeal ends.

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