Sipu Jha
PUNE: Weekend gridlocks have almost become a norm on the Mumbai-Pune expressway, and this Saturday was no exception. A surge of traffic once again brought the corridor to a crawl, with lumbering trailers and heavy vehicles choking the ghat stretch and turning peak-hour movement into a sluggish and exhausting ordeal. Officials said the traffic surge was partly due to local body election-related travel.This bottleneck comes barely days after a 32-hour ordeal caused by the overturning of a propylene tanker near the Adoshi tunnel in the Khandala ghat on Tuesday. The incident had triggered a massive traffic snarl, leaving thousands of commuters stranded as the congestion stretched up to 50km at its peak.
Travellers stuck in Saturday’s congestion reported significant delays, with travel time increasing by over an hour on several sections of the route. “Traffic stayed sluggish throughout the day, and people are still taking unusually long to reach their destinations. Even today (Saturday), vehicle movement was extremely slow. We had more than 25 cars travelling from Pune to Mumbai, and the trip ended up taking over five hours,” Pradeep Malpote, CEO of KP Travels, said.Malpote blamed heavy vehicles for the expressway’s traffic gridlock. “Trucks and containers are responsible for most of the congestion. Many of them straddle multiple lanes, leaving hardly any space for smaller vehicles to move,” he said.
A highway police official attributed the continued gridlock to election-related travel and the sudden movement of heavy vehicles that had been halted earlier in the week following a tanker accident. “Due to the zilla parishad and panchayat samiti elections, many people are travelling between villages and cities. Heavy vehicles that were stalled for the past two to three days have also started moving at once,” the official said. Police officers said intermittent traffic blocks were being enforced to regulate traffic.
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