Image Credit: deen I took about 2½ hours to reach office today. Apparantly some truck has oveturned near Chembur and hence all traffic from the Sion-Trombay highway has been diverted towards the Suman-nagar flyover (where Eastern Express enters the Island city). This has resulted in a huge traffic jam at Sion. The small incident explains how fragile the infrastructure demand-supply equilibrium is in Mumbai. The roads are just about sufficient to support traffic. So, if it rains or a truck/bus stranded on the road side - it creates queues of traffic kilometers long. Image Credit: Marc van der Chijs This is because of multiple reasons - first of course being that road-space is narrow. The others are like: There are no alternate routes to reach the Island city apart from the arterial roads. The JNPT road remains unutilized even at the time of the traffic jams and natural calamities like water logging. The Highway Maintenance services such as towing trucks to clear stranded vehicles are n...

Image Credit : Abhijeet Rane I took the Bandra-Worli Sealink to work today and as I started on the Sea-Link the song "Yeh Tumhari Meri Batien" from rock-on started playing on the Radio. Reached office from Borivli to Lower Parel in flat 40 minutes - the day could not have started better. Mumbai's infrastructure has been improving by the day. This city which looked "more like a conglomeration of many small cities from Ghatkopar to Andheri joined together" [ ref ] is now starting to take shape of a real megapolis. In the past 5 years, almost all roads have been cemented, pavements redone and flyovers has been made on most major traffic signals. To add icing to the cake we have the first phase of Metro (Andheri-Ghatkopar) coming up by 2010-11 and at least 3 monorail (Bandra, Santa-Cruz, Borivli) coming up by almost the same time. But a lot of this good work is undone by - hawkers who still occupy the pavements and footpaths (and often uproot the tiles on them to s...

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