CHENNAI: If you want to board a bus, where would you wait? A bus shelter may be your answer. However, that is not the case at the bus bay in the front yard of the Tambaram Railway Station. Passengers, who intend to take buses to suburbs around Tambaram and to other small towns like Mamallapuram, stand at a junction that’s highly risky.The intersection is located at a portion of the GST Road that abuts the entry-exit to a pedestrian subway, the starting point of the elevated portion of the new Road Over Bridge (ROB) towards Chengelpet, besides a narrow left turn to the bus bay inside the railway terminus. This location is heavily crowded by passengers, buses and other heavy vehicles. To add to the chaos, the place is dotted with unauthorised fruit vendors. They occupy the porch portions of the subway, besides eating up sizable space of the bus bay. As if this was not enough, several omni buses too are parked on the road for hours together. MTC and inter-district buses halt on the road in this cramped junction at any given point of time – even if it’s rush-hour, leading to heavy traffic congestion. Bus drivers in the rear end honk continuously to move ahead, and other commuters, on their way to climb the ROB, almost deafen you with their high-decibel horns.Why shouldn’t the passengers wait inside the bus bay, which is much safer? SK Manikumar, a small business owner and a regular commuter has a very ‘simple’ answer: “The buses stop precisely here.” However, the bus crew gives us a completely contradicting version, reminding us of the question, ‘What came first, the chicken or the egg?’ “We stop the bus ahead of the bay, despite the hardship we face, as people wait here. Many commuters are in the habit of ‘reserving’ seats even before the bus enters the designated spot. How can you blame us?” they ask.It would not serve any purpose to probe the origin of the practice. But the fact is that this makes passengers vulnerable to accidents, besides posing trouble to the bus crew. When the bus drivers try to enter the narrow lane towards the bay — amid heavy traffic and continuous honking — is it always possible to see how many people wait precariously on the lane margins? There is very little space for the buses to negotiate the turn. It would be in the interest of passengers to stop this practice of standing on the middle of the road to take the buses.Utilise more space to ease congestionOn the commotion at the bus bay area in Tambaram Railway Station, chairman of the Traffic and Transportation Forum, V Subramani and vice chairman, V Rama Rao, said that the voluntary body had already taken up the issue with the appropriate authorities. “After we represented this issue, the divisional railway manager, Anantharaman, visited the place and made a spot study,” said the activist duo. State Highways and traffic police officials were also present when the inspection was made. “Officials have assured us that appropriate action will be taken.” The solution for the problem lies in evicting the vendors, widening the bus bay and mandating the bus crew to halt only at the designated location inside the railway terminal, and not on the main road. “The system works perfectly at the Central Railway Station. We can certainly replicate it here. The railway authorities are willing to part with more space to end the woes of the public,” said Subramani and Rama Rao. Hope things change for the better.
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