Commuters, office-goers face traffic hassles

Bashir Ahmad, an employee of rural development from the main town of Baramulla district leaves early in the morning to reach his workplace at Ganderbal. Each day, he spends more than an hour in traffic jams on the way from his home to office.

“My reporting time for work is 10 am, each day I leave at around 8 in the morning, normally a distance of over 50 kilometers should be covered in an hour, but it takes me two hours due to heavy traffic jams which are being witnessed in the office hours across Kashmir,” Ahmad said.

   

Ahmad is not the only one who is facing this problem, almost everyone who leaves in the morning to attend office, business or workplace has to face these problems due to traffic rush which gets compounded with the government’s failure to widen the roads.

Azmat Jan, who is a teacher by profession has married in Sopore town, but her posting is in Srinagar district. Each day she commutes to and fro and takes care of her family including two children.

“Despite leaving hours earlier, I hardly manage to attend my school on time. Reason is the traffic situation across Kashmir. I leave my two-year old baby home when she is sleeping.”

As per the conservative estimate, almost on an average working class population loses an hour or more in the traffic congestions across Kashmir. If we assume that a person spends an hour in traffic jams every day, it means his 15 days out of 365 days in a year are spent in traffic jams.

The problem is not only the traffic snarls in the morning, but also while returning from the day’s hard work.

“Public transporters have no accountability, for a journey of barely 15 minutes they take an hour. If I take my vehicle then traffic mess ensures I reach home late, denying me the time to spend with my family and kids,” said Ajaz Ahmad, a J&K Bank employee who resides in Soura.

A senior traffic police official said that the problem is that the vehicle population has increased manifold but the road length is more or less the same. “Each year an estimated 60,000 vehicles are purchased, where will these vehicles go and the roads are same as they were decades back.”

“Take the example of Qamarwari road link, it was supposed to be widened in order to ease flow from North Kashmir, similarly road projects in Srinagar city like Khanyar-Pandach are awaiting widening for decades. Similarly the proposal to construct grade-separators at crucial junctions on Srinagar Bypass are still hanging, these are just a few examples. But despite all these constraints we are managing traffic movement,” he said.

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