The flyover from Chalukya Circle to Hebbal will be another colossal waste of public money like the elevated road to Electronic City. Not only is the project cost high but as iron can easily rust, the annual maintenance cost of the flyover to Hebbal will be exorbitant and labour-intensive, requiring costly water-proofing paint.
And even after building it, the city will continue to suffocate at the junction to junction traffic jams. Also, not everyone heading to the airport lives near the Chalukya Hotel and may have to cross many junctions, before reaching it merely to save 10 minutes of their journey on the costly steel flyover.
The better solution would be to build flyovers at the en route junctions alone catering to vehicular and pedestrian cross-traffic , which could cost only '90 crore, or less than five per cent of the Rs 1800 crore required to build the flyover to Hebbal.
Once the flyovers are built at the junctions, the road will behave more or less like an elevated one, but for a much lesser cost. Also, the traffic congestion towards Hebbal will ease considerably because there will be no need to stop at the junctions or pay a toll.
And with the massive saving of 95 per cent of the cost, equal to '1700 crore, we could make 400 to 500 flyovers at various junctions in the city, making them signal-free and non-stop, drastically reducing traffic congestion instantly in most parts.
This is a conservative estimate as you could build only around 500 flyovers if they were three- lane on each side. But if they were two- lane on one side and one-lane on the other, 700 to 800 such flyovers could be constructed using the cheaper conventional method, to relieve traffic congestion in the city.
(The writer is a retired engineer)
