The Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) has woken up from its slumber after 10 long years. To avoid accidents on the killer Nigdi flyover stretch, the civic body has started putting up metallic crash barriers on dividers, similar to the ones installed on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway.
It was a long pending demand of the citizens to find out solutions to avoid mishaps on the bridge. Late Madhukar Pawale Bridge, commonly known as Nigdi flyover, was constructed in 2002-03 by the PCMC to avoid traffic conjunctions at Tilak Chowk in Nigdi and to make a freeway for the vehicles using the Pune-Mumbai road.
But the improper road divider on the flyover caused many accidents, as speeding cars or bikes hit the dividers.
Executive engineer Shrikant Savane told dna, “Most of the accidents reported on the flyover were due to the improper road divider, so we have decided to place metallic crash barriers in the place of the dividers. The work is in progress.”
He added that these type of barriers are mainly used at express highways to avoid accidents. In similar accidents, well-known builder Vimal Kumar Jain and four others had died on this flyover when a water tanker jumped divider of flyover and landed on the car’s roof.
In a recent accident on the flyover, on October 12 a speeding car was reduced to ashes after hitting the divider. There were several unregistered mishaps on this flyover too.
Kiran Patil, a resident of Chinchwad, said, “Had the civic body taken this initiative earlier while constructing the flyover or roads, then many lives would have been saved.”
Another resident Ritesh Khardekar said the flyover needed to extend till Bhakti-Shakti Chowk in order to avoid traffic chaos. “It is evident from several cases that PCMC does not carry out proper study before initiating projects. Sometimes flyover designs are incorrect, sometimes planning of dividers is wrong.”
