Traffic trial at Shankar Chowk to ease gridlock

GURGAON: Chaotic traffic clogging Shankar Chowk almost every morning has the city’s traffic police scurrying to come up with a viable and sustainable solution. In a bid to relieve thousands of commuters entering Gurgaon from Delhi each day, cops deliberated over a stopgap solution on Friday.
A lane on the left-hand side of the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway will be earmarked for traffic going towards DLF Phase III and Ambience Mall.The solution might not work but the police department will carry out a trial run for a few hours on Tuesday morning.
“Earlier, it was planned for Monday morning but as there is too much traffic to handle on Mondays, we thought Tuesday would be a better day,” said Ashok Kumar Bakshi, ACP (traffic).
According to the plan, the traffic going from Delhi towards Gurgaon under the flyover will be allowed to move in a few designated lanes, leaving one extra lane on the left to allow the traffic coming from the opposite side to pass through.
At regular intervals, the traffic coming from Delhi will be stopped at Shankar Chowk and some of the vehicles on the opposite side will be allowed to navigate towards DLF Phase III or Ambience Mall.
Such a move would be possible only by earmarking one or two lanes on the extreme left which currently act as buffers for the traffic coming from the capital.
“Currently, the bottleneck occurs as more lanes (from Ambience till Shankar Chowk) converge into fewer lanes from Shankar Chowk and beyond. But when extra lanes are blocked, the traffic is expected to move freely without choking at any point,” said Col (retd) S C Talwar, a resident of Ambience Island apartments, who gave a set of suggestions to the traffic police on Friday to hammer out a solution to ease the daily mess at Shankar Chowk.
On being asked about the traffic problem, Vinod Kaushik, DCP (traffic), said, “It’s not a jam by any definition, just a mere congestion of vehicles. It happens everywhere, even in Delhi. The traffic movement slows during rush hours but it doesn’t stop at any point,” he said.