manoj

It was a plan to pave the future with concrete, but for the city’s trams, it looks like the ride is going to be bleak and bumpy. About Rs 100 crore has already been spent on concretising the tram tracks across the city, but more and more commuters seem to be shunning a ride. Tickets sales have dropped by 70% on some tram routes, leaving transport planners baffled.

“A wave of antipathy is making people shun trams. Old people, women and children always found them the safest mode of transport. But with the tracks being laid in concrete, they don’t find it easy to board trams anymore,” a senior Calcutta Tramways Company official said.

Barring a few stretches, tram tracks elsewhere are along the middle of the road. Earlier, such roads had an elevated platform along the middle and the tracks were within it. People could wait on the platform, separated from
the traffic. But once such tracks are relaid in concrete, people have to cross half the road’s width and stand in the middle of the speeding traffic to board a tram. This makes it unsafe for people to board trams, the CTC official said.

Transport minister Subhas Chakraborty agrees. “I have asked engineers to find a solution. Maintenance cost of tram tracks has come down to zero after the concretisation. Trams can also ply at greater speed, which benefits passengers.”

But transport engineers can’t figure out how to make the tram stops safe. Hooghly River Bridge Commissioners had earmarked these stops by installing solar studs. But these merely serve as indicators. They cannot prevent vehicles from running over the spots that are supposed act as stops. “Only a physical barrier can prevent other vehicles from running onto tram stops. As there are no such barriers, the risk of a passenger being knocked down remains high. After the tracks were relaid, vehicles move at high speed along the improved surface,” said the CTC official.

“Ideally, tram tracks should have been laid along the sides, as can be seen on Lenin Sarani. Initially, there was a plan to align tracks like this on all roads. But this would have meant a mammoth budget and caused massive traffic disruption for the period that work would have been in progress. So, the tracks had to be laid in concrete without changing their alignment,” said a senior transport engineer.Source:http://epaper.timesofindia.com (Kolkata Edition)
Date Of Publish: 23-Jan-07

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