Encroachments cause hours long traffic jams

LAHORE

Ineffective campaign of City District Government Lahore (CDGL) against temporary encroachments on major City roads and commercial centres is resulting in hours long traffic jams causing serious inconvenience to the citizens.

A visit to the city’s majority of the commercial hubs revealed that they are flooding with temporary encroachments, including illegal parking stands whereas the CDGL has completely failed in eliminating this mess on permanent basis. Ruthless, regular and effective campaigns can only eliminate these encroachments from the city roads, said majority of citizens while talking with The News here Sunday.

Citizens said encroachments on footpaths, walkways and roadsides had become a constant hurdle to the traffic of the provincial metropolis. They said this was causing serious inconvenience to the citizens both physically as well as financially.

Encroachments on the designated parking places force road users to either move continuously on the roads to get a parking place or they have to park their vehicles at wrong places, which result in traffic clogging. Though during the last one decade the government had spent billions of rupees on the improvement of road infrastructure and construction of new arteries connecting major roads, the issues remained the same.

The recent incident of smog, which prevailed over three or four days over the city and caused serious health issues, is one example of the present situation. One can witness the inefficiency and negligence of the city authorities on every road every day. Lahore Development Authority (LDA), City District Government Lahore (CDGL) and its nine towns, which are responsible to remove both permanent and temporary encroachments from roads, footpaths and roadsides are in deep sleep.

Besides affecting the routine life, these traffic jams hit citizens who are travel in an emergency. Honking ambulances stuck in traffic jams especially on Jail Road, Ferozepur Road, Queen's Road, Lawrence Road, The Mall, Canal Bank Road, Davis Road and Multan Road. It has now become a routine sight in the city.

Junaid Ahmed, a student of Town Planning, said citizens had to spend extra time as well as fuel on the roads as vehicles on busy roads continued to crawl the whole day causing nuisance to the commuters. The situation at peak hours appears to be horrible with complete traffic jams on almost every major roads, he said, adding that signal-free corridors especially of Ferozpur Road had once again turned into a jam-packed road.

Parking of vehicles on service lanes is also a major issue as there is no much space left on the service roads for the movement of traffic. One can witness this on Jail Road, Ferozpur Road, The Mall, Main Boulevards of Gulberg, Allama Iqbal Town, Gulshan-e-Ravi, Samanabad and many other major roads of the City.

Shahid Bhatti, a road traffic engineer, was of the view that the civic bodies should remove bottle necks from major roads such as Canal Bank Road, Jail Road, Ferozpur Road, etc. He said strict punishments should also be introduced for line and lane violations.

When contacted, a CDGL spokesman said that recently CDGL had declared 20 major city roads as model roads and no encroachments, illegal parking stands and wall chalking will be allowed on these roads. He said staff of CDGL, town administration and traffic police would monitor these roads 24 hours a day and submit their daily report to the DCO and DIG Traffic.

CDGL’s spokesman said that the model roads are: The Mall, Jail Road, Walton Road, Maulana Shaukat Ali Road, Main Road Johar Town, Peco Road, Ferozepur Road, Faisal Town Main Road, Model Town Link Road, Khayaban LDA Avenue 1, Allama Iqbal Road, Circular Road, Canal Bank Road, GT Road, Shalimar Link Road, Adda Bediayan and Jinnah Hospital Road.