Nightmare on JC road

   When ever I travel on JC road during peak hours, I become a nihilist. There is always a sudden upsurge of negative thoughts- as if all the troubles in the world have come to haunt me. All the things of past which I never wanted to remember comes flashing back. The prospects for my future plans suddenly look bleak. My goodness!! You may associate all such feelings with a graveyard but it happens to me on JC road.

Being one of the busier roads in Bangalore, JC road is any motorist’s nightmare. It is the only road which links areas like Jayanagar, Basavanagudi, and Lalbagh areas with the central business areas of Bangalore like the City Market and Majestic. The junction in front of the Town hall is probably the most polluted one in Bangalore. Most of the traffic on JC road crosses the town hall junction into the bottleneck in front of Canara Bank, then stops at another signal in front of LIC, and then another one in front of Halsurgate police station and finally one more at the entrance of KG road before entering into KG road. The distance between town hall and the entrance to KG road is not even half a kilometer but it takes anywhere between 10 to 25 minutes to cross this stretch depending on what time of the day you are traveling.

The only solution to this problem, I think, is a flyover- A 1-way flyover from JC road to KG road. And only this will ensure that this half-km journey takes only about 2 minutes. Along with this flyover, one more on KG road to cross the Avenue road and BVK Iyengar road junctions will solve every traffic problem of this region.

But flyovers are just short-term solutions to Bangalore’s traffic woes. Bangalore’s public transport system (BMTC) shares the same road-space with the private users. Until we separate it and also make sure that Bangaloreans begin to switch to public transports instead of using their own vehicles, all plans for Bangalore’s infrastructure will remain only a dream. The Metro rail is the best solution.