Mumbai wakes up to traffic nightmare

The derailment of the Virar-Churchgate train near the Andheri station, people shopping for Ganapati, and a huge influx of state transport and private buses in the city – all combined to create a traffic nightmare for Mumbaikars on Tuesday.

Among the worst-affected stretches was the Senapati Bapat Marg starting from Dadar all the way till Tilak Bhavan junction in front of the Indiabulls office complex, as hundreds of state transport buses were parked at right angles to the pavement.

"This road is already congested and with the way the buses were parked and people were moving about to board them, the road had turned into double lane with just 30 feet of space. The area just along the recently-built Pramod Mahajan park and BMC vehicle shed was the worst. The stretch, not more than 5-km in length, took about 30 minutes to cross," said Ram Nivas Gupta, a taxi driver.

Understandably, almost all taxi drivers on the western fringe of Dadar refused to ferry those who wanted to go towards Elphinstone Road, Phoenix Mills and Mahalaxmi. Crowd thronging the Dadar flower market also added to the chaos.

Earlier in the afternoon, a local train derailed near Andheri station, almost doubling the traffic on road. The worst bottleneck was the Jogeshwari-Vikhroli link road (JVLR) with vehicles taking over an hour to clear the 6-km stretch from MIDC in Andheri (E) to Western Express Highway (WEH), in front of the Jogeshwari trauma centre.

"It was a mess. I started from Mulund near Nirmal mall around 12.30pm and reached WEH near the trauma centre around 2pm. It took me an hour to clear JVLR. The entire junction was a bottleneck," said Puneet Kumar, a Mulund resident.