The district headquarters comprising three towns – Kazipet, Hanamkonda and Warangal witnessed enormous development over the past two decades.
One can get any branded garment or footwear. More colleges have come up and many more shopping complexes have come up. But the traffic grew from bad to worse as the roads did not witness any development. Neither are they widened nor extended any further.
Speaking to The Hindu , Superintendent of Police (Urban) A Venkateswar Rao said the greatest problem facing the police department in Urban is traffic management. “All pavements are encroached. We have less strength in traffic wing. The roads remain the same over the decades,” he explained.
All the tri-cities, as the district headquarters is now called, has only 80 kilometres main road including all bypasses. But the number of vehicles is growing at alarming rate. The tri-cities have over 40,000 auto-rickshaws, nearly four lakh two-wheelers, over 30,000 goods carriers, 33,135 four wheelers and all other vehicles put together constitute another 70,000.
During the peak hours at Hanamkonda and Warangal chowrastha are clogged. The citizens are impatient and vie to move on at snail speed.
Mr. Venkateswar Rao says there are no parking places at important junctions. The shop goers find it difficult and they just park their vehicles on main thorough fare without minding the difficulty of others. The poorly staffed police department was unable to face the challenge.
“In recent times, we tried to free the pavements so that pedestrians do not occupy the main road. We are working in coordination with Warangal municipal corporation. The vendors raised a banner against us. We are still working on it,” he explained.
Indiscriminate parking on main roads, occupation of the carriage space by hawkers and petty vendors, lack of traffic sense among the citizens and lack of parking space are some of the problems that need to be addressed urgently before the district headquarters grows to unmanageable level.
Hanamkonda traffic Circle Inspector, S Venkatesh opines that a ring road should be formed to ease the traffic congestion. Similarly, he advocates for multi-level parking complexes, creation of separate hawkers zones and strengthening of traffic police force for effective management.
