Sadly, even as the state plans another major infrastructure project to ease congestion, a serious traffic bottleneck has emerged at the junction where the Eastern Bypass meets the Margao Western Bypass at Nuvem, near the Honda showroom.
Motorists using the junction are routinely confronted with long traffic halts, delays and confusion due to what many describe as a flawed road design. Instead of allowing vehicles from the Eastern Bypass to seamlessly merge with the Western Bypass, the existing layout forces motorists to cut across moving traffic before joining the highway, creating congestion and increasing the risk of accidents.
The situation has raised questions over whether the junction conforms to established road engineering and highway design standards.
Public Works Department (PWD) Minister Digambar Kamat and senior department officials may need to examine whether the intersection was designed in accordance with accepted traffic engineering norms.
The design has also prompted questions over why the PWD did not provide a direct merging arrangement that would have enabled traffic from the Eastern Bypass to automatically join the Western Bypass without interrupting vehicles already travelling on the latter.
Sources familiar with the project said the PWD had originally proposed routing traffic from the Eastern Bypass onto the adjoining village panchayat road. Under the plan, vehicles would have travelled along the local road, passed through an underpass and then joined the Margao Western Bypass.
However, the proposal reportedly met with stiff opposition from residents, who argued that the narrow panchayat road was never intended to handle the heavy volume of traffic expected on the Eastern Bypass. Locals feared the arrangement would overwhelm the village road network, create congestion within residential areas and pose safety risks for pedestrians and local commuters.
Following objections from the local population, the proposal was dropped. Although the Eastern Bypass was eventually connected to the Western Bypass, no alternative engineering solution was implemented to provide a free-flowing merger. The result is the present intersection, where conflicting traffic movements have become a daily occurrence and where motorists frequently experience lengthy delays.
