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A new undertaking by me where I congratulate road development and management authorities in India and primarily in Mumbai for their excellent work. By doing this I aim to bring forth the achievement to the entire world to learn and adopt. It's only fair that hard work and effort be rewarded and shown to the entire world.

The first set of awards goes to 'Whoever Manages the Flyovers of Mumbai' for 'Superior Attempts at Traffic Decongestion'. You sir are my mentor and the individual I would look up to all my life. Your excellent skill sets and admirable insight is mind-numbing which I doubt the greatest of minds of the world put together would fail to accomplish. In case you are still wondering why these prestigious compliments are being showerd upon you, please allow me to explain myself in the following illustration.

 

Above is an overhead illustration of what Mumbai's Western Express Highway looked like somewhere around 1995. The highway was dotted with traffic junctions which allowed people to turn into the city which subsequently cause major traffic havocs. In order to get over this, you sir, an officer at the MMRDA (Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Authority) deviced a ground breaking plan where every junction would have a flyover running above it in order to avoid the traffic snarls. Yes indeed, this idea was fabulous and did indeed bring a lot of respite to daily commuters. Please refer following illustration

 

 So now you hop, skip and jump over every junction and do not climb the flyover for any exit into the city. This worked fine and smooth for roughly about 10 years. As you must be aware, India is now the second largest and fastest growing economy of the world. It is an achievement to be proud of but there is also a flipside to this. Due to this tremendous growth, people's paycheck increases and when that happens they buy more things like televisions, laptops, houses and CARS. With more cars adding onto the road each and every day, your ingenious solution showed its true prowess. This achievement is so great that I have no words for it (literally) and hence I will showcase you another piece of my fine artistary.

 

Allow me to explain the depth of the above caricature. With so many flyovers being built almost above every intersection soon made the highway like a never ending camels hump back where the moment you get off one flyover, another one begins. Traffic wishing to join the highway (yellow line) had to cut sharply to the right in order to get on to the flyover. Traffic wishing to get off the highway (red line) had to cut sharply to the left in order to avoid getting on the next flyover. With no system in place to ensure smooth exit and entry onto the highway, traffic incoherently swivled in the direction of choice with frequent disasters occuring. These disasters would have a catastrophic chain of events on the traffic lining up behind them which soon led to serpentine and slow moving ques across the length and breadth of the highway.

Master, I bow down to your remarkable insight and ground-breaking achievement that you so devised and hailed upon us. My utmost respect and admiration goes out to you. Once again, I have no words, only MS Paint.

 A traffic signal! Ingenious I tell you! A puzzle that would baffle Einstein and you gave us the most obvious solution, install a traffic signal right at the foot of the flyover. But wait a minute, wasn't the flyover created to avoid a traffic signal?

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So if you would install a traffic signal at the foot of every flyover, wont it be 1995 all over again?

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And then will you, in all your intelligence, create another flyover to fly over the current flyover?

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Mumbai, Year: 2020

  

Dont believe me? Take a look for yourself! (Bandra juntion, October, 2011.)

(Image coming soon)

DNA article: http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report_new-signal-adds-to-bandra-traffic-woes_1323416