Kalyaninagar Pune Traffic As if traffic already wasn’t chaotic enough. More chaos is on its way. GK road. SV Bridge and now it’s Kalyaninagar. The Ahmednagar road is slated to be about 60 metre wide beginning from Yerwada chowk to Wagholi or within Pune City limits. technically that’s about 10 lanes a side. It already is that wide post, Vimannagar. It’s about 45 metres wide as of now between Yerwada to Aga Khan Palace.. 7.5 lanes a side as of today. standard city traffic thumb rule is 3 metres to a lane. PMC is happy to dig up about 30 metres width of this patch initially, after the Yerwada junction and around Shastri Chowk. The turn off to Kalyaninagar. This it’s doing for 2 grade separators that will take traffic to and fro at the Kalyaninagar junction. Later they will dig further for a flyover too. 5 phases of construction over 3 years. It will be a kilometer long extravaganza. That kilometre will become a construction site for the next half a decade. 732 meters out of which will get delivered after due transfomation. This also means, at best about 7.5 metre odd will be left over on either side of the road. 15 metre total. 2.5 lanes a side. No footpath. Footpath: What’s that ? Well, That may not be enough to accommodate 20,000 vehicles per hour or so they insist is the traffic load after studying the traffic data for a full 4 days on the stretch. Never mind what the traffic will be like during monsoon, festival times or even during new years and weekends. Never mind, extreme rainfall events or heat waves. As usual, they've studied traffic only for 4 days and think thats enough data to base a project worth almost 100 crore upon. The surplus traffic “no prizes for guessing” will be diverted into Kalyaninagar via Ramwadi to Shastri Chowk and vice versa. About 1 lakh vehicles every 5 hours during peak hours morning, noon and night will be in Kalyaninagar now trying to get to the other end. Don't worry too much about the airport traffic which uses the Ramwadi grade seperator or the metro footfalls. Welcome jams, delays to get to the airport and severe congestion along arterial roads of Kalyaninagar. it is estimated over 1 lakh people commute to the airport and Vimannagar through nagar road and kalyaningar everyday. Pune now has around 200 flight movements. 3.5 lakh people commute to and fro Kharadi and an additional 1 lakh odd to Magarpatta and Amanora. Just FYI, so you know. There’s a strong possibility they might widen Nagar road after digging it first. Because, they haven’t acquired any land on either side of the existing road. But, they want to begin this project in a rush. Probably within the next 2-3 months. Some say there will be delays, due to the Aga Khan Palace being a heritage structure. The other side however, certainly isn’t. Surprisingly, societies on the Kalyaninagar side such as Matruchhyaa have already received notices for land acquisition over a decade ago, with no moves taken to action acquisition and or road widening. Their fate hangs in the balance. Be that as it may, This will be the arrangement for the next 3 years until the project is completed. If it gets over in 3 years. That is. Until then Kalyaninagar will become Nagar road and vice versa. It’s not over yet, there will be a flyover from the Golf Club side (loop road) landing on Nagar Road so that all traffic coming through from there will breeze through the Shastri Nagar Junction and get on Nagar road. It won’t be vice versa (its just one way), so there will be that road above the grade separator for sure. Now we have a few grade separator experiments already running in Pune. The famous ones being the twins on JM Road. Next famous one being at Ramwadi connecting KN to VN & the airport. Almost all of them flood during heavy rains. What about that. I’m not sure they have applied their mind to it, yet they insisted. That they’ll build a storm water drain 1200 mm in diameter or 1.2 metres, They’ll connect that directly to the river and are definitely sure that the water will get evacuated. Given recent 100 mm plus rainfall phenomena the water floods streets despite there being natural drainage to evacuate the surplus eg; Yerwada chowk ; Jangli Maharaj Road ; North Main Road. What if the river floods and the water flows backwards in a blow back of sorts. Flooding the grade separator, after all the separator is going to be 10 metres deep into the ground. The storm water infrastructure 2 metres further below that. Have they checked if the floor of the separator is below the river bed level, have they checked for pluvial and fluvial flooding scenarios, to prevent this from becoming a swimming pool. I don’t think so. They dont give any straight answers. Well yet again, Never mind that, How is one supposed to cross Nagar road anymore ? It seems there is no provision left for pedestrians to cross. Not during the construction and certainly not post construction either. The only provision there is, is for footpaths post construction which will be 2.5 metres wide at best and the joke is they insist it is IRC compliant. On being informed that IRC is now law and the footpath should be 5.2 metre wide alongwith a MUZ & a cycle track taking it to 7.2 metres., they balked. How could they give up a car lane for lowly pedestrians. Furthermore, They don’t know if this expenditure of 80 to 100 crore odd will solve the traffic problem because they haven’t run a simulation model of current traffic scenarios on the new “contraption” they’re out to construct - never mind future traffic loading scenarios. The near future ; Out of the 500 odd acres that constitutes the area from yerwada to wadgaon sheri, the Nagar road serves as a natural boundary on one end, the river does on the other. What lies in between upto wadgaon sheri qualifies as kalyaninagar. half of this area or more than half, specifically is empty. Not for long though, because the Wadia estate worth over 100 acres odd and over 40 lakh sq feet of supply at the minimum, will soon be in the market. Similarly the Mulik family holding's of over 55 acres, will find its way into the marketplace too one day or another. Thats 20 lakh sq ft more again at the minimum. Latest FSI rules provide for much more. Add to this heady mix, the spectre of redevelopment and bigger, taller and larger buildings. The Population of Kalyaninagar could go up 5X to 1.5 lakhs from the current 25,000 within the next 5 years. All of these upwardly mobile folks will own cars independently. So even after tolerating 3 years of traffic diversions of lakhs of vehicles per day through kalyaninagar we don’t know if this "monster" project will succeed or help us. In the near future Kalyaninagar may become famous for perpetually grid locked traffic. When you have traffic which is in perpetual grid lock, isn't it important to begin looking at alternatives. After all, public transportation is about moving people and not cars alone. No study of any such alternatives such as an internal tram system, committed roads for collectives / buses, the metro line to the airport or its versions, have been completed or proposed. In fact they just broke the BRT up in preparation for this widening. I doubt any public transport alternatives have even been considered as a solution, all they have proposed is that this monster flyover and grade seperator - will be it. 20,000 PCU should mean increased thrust upon public transportation to reduce PCU's. (passenger car units per hour). Nobody is supposed to question the wisdom of these engineers, despite the disasters they have been inflicting upon the city again and again. Vishweshwaraya Mokshagundam flyover, Magarpatta flyover, Hadapsar flyover, University chowk flyover, FC road flyover, Warje flyover and Hinjewadi flyover being some of the prime examples. Pune needs 10,000 buses but we barely have 1500 functional. Safety. Kalyaninagar saw the Porsche incident and today incidentally Koregaon Park saw the Audi incident. Almost 2 lives are lost everyday in Pune. Wider roads, flyovers & grade separators create faster traffic. Upto 3X faster. Maybe more. They also create increased incidence of black spots, collisions and pile ups. One doesnt have to look further than Navle Bridge to understand this phenomena or the Katraj Kondhwa road. Sadly, PMC engineers have not taken any of this phenomena into account while designing this bridge. Is this project a cure looking for a disease ? Lastly, If they superimposed their own traffic data on this new bridge they intend to inflict upon us and observe the traffic behaviour through traffic modelling for monsoons, peak hours and times. They would get a fair understanding of what essentially has to be built and how. There is no application of mind, neither has any view from any transportation expert been taken in the matter. This seems like an engineering project taken up by engineers to further fail the system. The whole nation is an engineering failure in one form or another. Evidence, phones dont work, the power goes out and our roads are a joke. Despite coughing up the highest taxes in Pune, Kalyaninagar, Koregaon Park and Viman nagar do not have a single zero defect road or a predictable traffic free circumstance. The missing links in terms of SV bridge or the 300 metres of Road that will connect kalyaninagar afresh with Yerwada chowk along the metro line is some time away, The first is a minimum of 3 years away and the second nobody knows about, yet there is a rush to get into this mess and repent at leisure. We suffer the will of these engineers, bureaucrats and politicians. This is our lot, This is our fate and some things never change. The contracting for this project is already over, the work orders have been issued. Not much can be done about it now. The public as usual was engaged yesterday for the first time after everything is over. "Pre-determined". It is called "development" nowadays - grin and bear it. @timesofindia @zoru75 @SVYadwadkar @gurudasn @WagholiHSA @NewKalyaniNagar @manoj_dudhankar @ppcr_pune @NishitKamath @vimannagarpune @LRWAPune @IndianExpress @abpmajhatv @SakalMediaNews @lokmat @sumitakale @PuneRivers @jbaphna @WMMaharashtra