By IANS,
New Delhi : After three days of chaos on Delhi’s streets and Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit’s veiled threat to scrap the new bus corridors, officials from the implementing agencies Thursday sweated it out to minimise commuter woes on the 5.6-km-long Ambedkar Nagar-Moolchand bus corridor.
There was only marginal improvement in the traffic flow as many skipped the bus rapid transit system corridor to avoid harrowing jams. The traffic snarls over the last few days left many apprehensive about getting onto the new corridor.
“I first took the route Tuesday. It was horrifying. The car-motorbike lane was choc-a-bloc. The traffic hardly moved. It was almost the same Wednesday. As a result, I avoided the route Thursday,” said Ankit Manohar, an executive with a private bank in Connaught Place.
The chaos forced senior officials including the Delhi Integrated Multimodal Transport System (DIMTS) chief S.N. Sahai, Manoj Aggarwal, head, transport, R.S. Minhas, senior manager, Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS), officials from the Transport Department including commissioner R.K. Verma, Delhi Traffic Police and other experts to personally monitor the test-run along the entire route.
DIMTS, the implementing agency for the corridor, has deployed all key officials in an attempt to justify the Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit-led Congress government’s decision to elevate the city’s public transport on par with Beijing, Mexico City, Bogotá, Taipei and Hanoi – to name a few cities where BRTS has been successful.
“There is still a long way to go till we fine-tune systems,” admitted a key government official.
Though officials claimed that the situation had improved, there were still some bottlenecks especially where the traffic from the Chirag Dilli side merged with the corridor.
“It was a key blockage that was removed Wednesday night itself. We are trying to see if traffic flow will be normal,” claimed Sunil Mudgal, public relations officer, DIMTS.
Authorities are planning to monitor the traffic flow and the glitches, if any, before it is thrown open to the public.
The test run that started over the weekend was a motorist’s nightmare. The negative publicity drew flak from Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, who blasted the implementing agencies for not doing their homework properly. As a result the government has put the construction work of new corridors on hold.
Dikshit had called the meeting to discuss the problems emanating from the trial run of the corridor. She will again review the progress Saturday. The Ambedkar Nagar-Moolchand corridor is scheduled to be opened officially for the public May 1.
The city government has decided to introduce more low floor high capacity buses and ordinary buses of the DTC. The private Blueline buses, numbering around 100, will be phased out from the corridor from May 1.