Very recently Chennai Traffic has become a nightmare. From anywhere to anywhere during daytime nowadays takes nothing less than 45 minutes. Today I started from Asian Printers (near Royappetah Hospital) at 8.15PM and reached my house at West Mambalam at 9.15 – can you believe it, it took me 1 hour for a journey that should’ve taken me 15-20 minutes even during peak hours. I was spending nearly 40 minutes of this around Panagal Park. It is the scene every day and Chennai Corporation doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it, though they made empty announcements. Media is abuzz that the reason why nothing is done around Panagal Park is due the undue influence of all the commercial establishments there, who don’t wish the problem to be fixed. If the problem gets fixed it will mean people spending less time in the area and eventually less business. I don’t understand the logic, if you solve the traffic problem here, you will have more people coming and hence more business. But who said everything in India and our politicians do things with logic. 
Instead of this location Corporation is going ahead with building flyovers (bridges) in all the wrong places. I don’t understand the need for building a bridge near Vani Mahal. Anyway’s, the point of this post is why on earth anyone will begin work for two bridges at the same time on roads with traffic going in the same direction. I am talking about the Kodambakkam High Road/North Usman Road bridge and GN Chetty Road/Thirumalai Pillai Road (Vani Mahal) bridges here. Both roads take traffic from Panagal Park (and the surrounding areas) to Gemini Flyover (Anna Salai). Since both the bridges are being built at the same time, both the junctions have got the whole carriageway to a single lane. Instead, it would have been better planning to take one work after the other. Maybe the government wanted to complete both the bridges before their remaining 4 years in office :-)
I have got some photos taken during peak hours in both the junctions, see them below:
Traffic going slow near Kodambakkam High Road/North Usman Road
Traffic Jam at GN Chetty Road/Thirumalai Pillai Road Junction
We, the so called highly paid IT people are the worst affected. The government is trying to lay a road and call it IT highway. I don’t really understand the reason for delay when you had all the encrouchments removed during the prvious government’s rule. I work out of Sozhinganallur and stay @ Mahalingapuram. If i start by 6:00PM, it takes me at least 2 hours to reach home. I am just drawing parallels when I used to travel to my native (pondicherry) on fridays…It was taking just 2 hours 40 minutes to reach pondicherry if I start from Tiruvanmiyur in a government bus. If travelling 160 Kms and 22 Kms take nearly the same time, then you can understand the state of ill managed traffic we have in chennai. Rains have started and now is the time they dig up some busy road like the Velachery Tambaram road making life miserable for commuters. It took me 2 hours to reach velachery from Thuraippakkam a couple of days ago.
It is not at all helped by the lack to self discipline by the 2 and four wheeler drivers. Everyone wants to go to their destinations first. Even Signals don’t stop most of the people. If a policeman is not present in a Signal, then people just don’t respect the lights on the signals. It is actually the basic fault with which we have been made to grow up in this corruption lit country. Have we come across any overspeeding/signal jumping driver fined a huuuuuge money? No. So people just have a feeling that nobody will be bothered to fine them. In other countries, Even the Signals/Junctions which are not watched through the CC cameras don’t have any issues. Each driver respects other drivers. That will make our roads hell of a lot easier to ride…