Vijayawada: The Vijayawada Municipal Corporation’s move to categorise city into zones and shift hawkers away from busy city roads has come as a great relief to the commuters as well as traffic authorities.
Due to the encroachment of several city roads by these vendors who setup temporary stalls and push carts on either side of road, traffic jams occur frequently.
This is mostly seen at Besant Road, Swarjya Maidan Rythu Bazaar Road, Patamata Rythu Bazaar Road, Pata-mata, Nirmala Convent Road, KP Nagar service road and several other roads in Moghalrajp-uram, Suryaraopet, Dornakal road, Nakkal road, Eluru road face severe traffic congestion particularly due to presence of hawkers.
However, as the VMC initiated to implement National Policy on Urban Street Vendors, the traffic problem at these centres could be resolved to an extent.
“Interruption to vehicles by hawkers cause average speed of a vehicle reduce and the time of journey increases. This is causing long halts on roads,” said a traffic police officer.
He said, the arrangement of hawkers with respect to traffic flow on a particular road would solve the problem.
“More than 70 per cent of the road at Patamata and Swar-ajya Maidan Rythu Bazaars are occupied by vendors causing traffic jams all through the day. Relocating them would help commuters a lot,” said P. Sita Ram, a commuter at Patamata Rythu Bazaar.
The VMC announced around 9 areas as green zones, 12 areas as amber zones and 25 areas as red zones. In the green zones, hawkers are permitted to vend as usual, in the amber zones there would be certain restrictions on time and place of vending and in the red zones vending on roads is strictly prohibited.
