By IANS,
New Delhi : The Delhi High Court would Thursday pronounce its verdict on a plea seeking permission for cars to use a road lane reserved for buses on the bus rapid transit (BRT) corridor here.
A division bench of Justice Pradeep Nandrajog and Justice Manmohan Singh had Sep 24 reserved the order after all the parties concluded their arguments on a plea filed by an NGO, which sought scrapping of the traffic arrangement on the 5.8-km-long Ambedkar Nagar-Moolchand BRT corridor in south Delhi.
NGO Nyaya Bhoomi’s president B.B. Sharan alleged that the corridor was causing inconvenience to the public.
Sharan had referred to a survey report of the Central Road Research Institute (CRRI) on the functioning of the BRT and sought its scrapping on the ground that it was harassing the commuters and was a complete wastage of public money.
However, during the hearing the city government had defended the BRT system and criticised the CRRI report terming it “unconstitutional” and “irrational” as it ignored the rights of bus commuters.
The CRRI in its report, prepared after trial runs on the corridor as directed by the court, suggested that “NO BRT” option yielded better benefits for this corridor with the given traffic conditions.
The petition filed by the NGO said that most of the time the reserved bus lane remained empty with the situation on other lanes, meant for cars and other vehicles, remaining chaotic and the people getting stuck in jams for hours.
The petition sought court’s sought direction to the Delhi government to allow cars to run on the corridor lane, reserved for buses, during non-peak hours.
The 5.8-km stretch of BRT corridor — between Moolchand and Ambedkar Nagar in south Delhi — was introduced in 2008 and designed on the model of Bogota city in Colombia to make bus travel safer and faster, and encourage travel that did not involve cars.