Friday, January 22, 2010

The story of Hosur Road.

When i was in Bangalore, i used to stay in a place called BTM Layout. Its a pretty popular residential place for IT guys as it is near to Electronic City. You can actually count non-IT guys in that place. From BTM layout to Electronic city we had to go through a junction called Silk Board which was a couple of kilometers from my home. From that junction there is a 8 to 9 km straight road (four lanes) to Electronic City.

When i joined Wipro in 2004, we used to use this road to go to the office. It used to take 15-20 mins everyday. The road was good and had way more capacity than the the existing traffic. I remember one of my colleague telling me that why do we need such a big road when there is no traffic. But within 6 months everything changed. There was more traffic than the road could handle thanks to the amazing growth in IT in Bangalore. Now the travel time changed from 20 mins to one hour and even more in the evening time. And looking at the amount of new campuses being developed in Electronic city area, it was hard to imagine what it was going to be in next five years. People preferred working in Whitefield or other business locations and a lot of people quit their jobs as it was one big ordeal to reach office daily.

I changed my job and my new office was at MG road. It was not a big relief in terms of the traffic for me as Bangalore traffic was getting bad to worse and the work on infrastructure was hardly making progress thanks to Dharam singhs and Kumaraswamys. In few months i saw an announcement that they were building a flyover from silkboard to E-city to ease the traffic and it was supposed to open in start of 2008 or something. It was a great news but the work never started on time. When it started it added to the commuters woes. Offices changed their transport timing to control the traffic. The work on flyover was going on at snails pace.

In Jan 2010, i heard that the flyover is finally open. I hope it is good enough for the existing traffic. Still wonder why our city planners cannot think ahead of time. Even if they plan it takes ages to execute the projects. Dont know how many years will be needed to complete Metro rail construction.


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