Flyovers — flight of imagination

As everyone knows, none of these are mentioned in the current Development Proposals of Greater Mumbai. DPs, as they are popularly called, are 1:4000 scale drawings of all wards of Mumbai which have typically not been updated in the past ten years or so!

As a result, DPs do not show present structures. For instance, they show the Juhu Airport/field as a `park’.

Therefore the very concept of DP is questionable.This also raises the point as to how such large-scale projects are planned and implemented without any referendum. It is not sufficient to say referendum is alien to us. It is also incorrect to say that any study, be it Atkins or Paranjpe or Jog, shows the necessity of such flyovers. Such reports are only a means to an end. And we know what that means.

It’s not a debate between environmentalists and government. It’s the basic question as to whether all this was required and whether we have made effective use of existing resources. There’s no road space for 350 new vehicles [an increase of 50 from 300 always quoted earlier for years together] flooding the city each day. That’s about one and a quarter lakh extra, or a 10 per cent increase, per year.

How about this statistic: Out of our road space, one-third to half of our effective road space is unused due to various obstructions wrongly parked vehicles, encroachments, rubble, debris and road works. So, we can increase our road area efficiencyby a quarter, taking care of our requirements for two-and-a-half years.

Besides, footpaths are encroached upon not only by hawkers but also the labour colony hutments for people working on government projects. And then our traffic management. One-ways are flouted, double/triple parking overlooked, cutting into wrong lanes and consciously jumping signals. Have we ever thought about working on this to use the same road space more effectively. Then why build flyovers?

Advanced techniques are being used to speed up construction! I call it a hollow claim. Surely pre-fabricated concrete work is decades old technology. But what we still see are most primitive and archaic work sites the usual manual labour, completely ad-hoc service roads, inadequate warning signs and lights. Why aren’t steel flyovers being considered? With genuinely `modern’ anti-corrosive treatments and special steels available at a marginal extra cost, these would have been ready much faster, offsetting the additional cost. And they wouldhave been more elegant, too.

We can overlook that also, but not that these are truly unintegrated with the rest of the road network. There is not a single explanatory map provided for the road and flyover network. More so in Navi Mumbai, where there are a plethora of such flyovers, each to its own.

At places, it is positively unsafe as the road suddenly forks into two, and one has to make a choice within seconds — otherwise you will either be in the wrong lane or into the divider, or the railing (as the MSRDC says, `anti-crash barrier’).

A major flaw in all these is the lack of any built-in crossing facility, either underground or overbridge, for pedestrians. It is something for the MSRDC to think about and explain as to how are we supposed to cross such wide roads at one go during the stop signal for traffic. Then again, there are no footpaths for walking below the bridges. Having seen the entry and exit hairpin ramp in the plans of Western Mall below the Andheri flyover, I can vouch for the factthat had it been a final-year student’s design in architecture, it would be rejected outright.

Also, it’s astonishing that there is no provision for emergency or maintenance approaches on such long flyovers. Lighting is also extremely poor, sometimes non-existent the Mahim-Bandra flyover has numerous blind spots. The stretch is lit with hundreds of lamps illuminating the hoardings. All this needs serious thought, what with road safety being a non-issue for the MSRDC. In fact, the astonishing admission of Mr R.C. Sinha, MSRDC — during a debate on these flyovers at the Nehru Centre two months ago — that the northern section from Bandra to Versova will be built `only if the MCGM’s DPs require it’, means that these are not in accordance with the DP. In any case, the corridor beyond Worli, toward Nariman Point, is still in the `planning’ phase.

The news that the Dadar flyover is being modified at this stage, after months of construction, means it started without adequate planning — with the soleobjective of starting something fast and trying to complete it as soon as possible without anyone ending up wiser.

Then we have the road over roads. The three being planned — Haji Ali to Tardeo to Chowpatty, Byculla to Mohammed Ali Road to Crawford Market and Vile Parle to Andheri to Jogeshwari — are truly out of context.

Much more can be said, but it will still be inadequate to show that huge yet wrong investments are the order of the day.

— JAGDEEP DESAI is vice-chairman of the Brihanmumbai Centre, IIA and editor, of Indian Institute of Architects newsletter