The Gurgaon toll plaza is in the news spotlight these days but sadly not for the good reasons.A 32 lane toll plaza that was supposed to help ease out the commute from Delhi to Gurgaon has in fact become a big hurdle these days where one can be stuck in a jam for about 1.5 hours or so.
Ever since it was inaugurated, there has been a huge rush of people to start using it and the systems are unable to handle the rush at all.
Bhuwan has done an elaborate post on it already. Despite being in construction for so long, they probably didn't do much planning regarding these toll booths. And to some extent the commuters are also to blame. Yesterday when my in-laws were coming down from Jaipur, where luckily there wait was for ONLY 45 minutes there, they noticed there are people giving 500 rupee notes just because they would get loose change even when they had loose change with them. Can you just imagine?? *rolling my eyes*
So giving out balance for such high value notes was again something which was increasing the amount of time each booth was taking to process one vehicle. How can people act so stupid and just so immature?? Its just beyond me.
And today while driving down to work, listening to Red FM's approach on this whole Gurgaon jam made me laugh. A real big hearty laugh. They are distributing Ludo games to people going on the Gurgaon expressway for entertaining themselves in case they get stuck in the jam too. Funny isn't it? :D
this was a disaster just waiting to happen. have been wanting to rant about gurgaon in a post which i will do soon :)
ReplyDeleteAbout 5 years back, when the construction on the expressway began, someone asked me if this reduce the travel time, I said no and it is sheer waste of public money.
ReplyDeleteThere is a mathematical proof for the jam to happen at toll plaza
I did a bit of analysis on the bsis of number of vehicles passing from a particular toll gate and the time it takes to process one transaction.
Between 30th Jan 2008, 8:31 AM and 7th Feb 2008, 8:54 AM, 34675 vehicles crossed gate no. MN012. This implies average transaction time of just under 20 seconds per vehicle. In other words 3 vehicles per minute per gate and with 16 gates 48 Vehicles in a minute and 2880 vehicles per hour in one direction.
What if traffic is 6000 vehicles per hour during peak period? Naturally the system will collapse and the waiting time will increase.
this is what is happening at the toll plaza.
Now is there any solution?
Even if the toll gate start taking half the time they are taking today, the problem will still not solve because the problem will noe shift to next bottleneck which is Udyog Vihar. Because now more vehicles per unit time will reach the junction and the jam will occur there.
The root cause of the problem are the points of convergence where the traffic coming from different directions merge and the points of divergence.
These were never paid attention too. Too much of concentrated construction was allowed in smaller areas which are not prepared to handle sudden upsurge of traffic.
To put it simply more water will not flow into river ganges by widening it nor will it solve the problem of flooding.
It is clear case of rubbing balm on tummy to reduce swelling when actually the lady is pregnant.
Good luck to all who though that they can zip through Gurgaon. Ha Ha Ha
Came across this blog http://bizine.blogspot.com where someone has actually written a business case study on this.
ReplyDeleteIt had my attention for a while- but am sorry no sympathies for the mgmt for mis-managing this.
the problem is nothing but the very basic human tendency, which people show only at the toll plaza....i.e shifting the lanes as fast as possible...as they keep shifting the companies...so this problem can only be solved by solving the mystry within one's inner self..which being quite impossible....so face the jams on weekdays and get lucky on saturdays and sundays ....cheers!!!!
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