Urban News

The Hindu  19.10.2010

Parking yard for container trucks coming up in port

R. Srikanth

CHENNAI: A parking yard to accommodate as many as 350 container trucks is being developed by the Chennai Port Trust near Gate No.1 of the port in Kasimedu. The facility is expected to significantly ease traffic congestion on Suryanarayana Road, north Chennai.

The yard is coming up on a vacant land measuring 5.5 acres inside the port at a cost of Rs.2 crore. According to a senior official of the Chennai Port Trust, the work is under way and the facility is expected to be completed by December.

In the absence of adequate parking space inside the port, container-laden trucks line up on Suryanarayana Road, an important link road to the Ennore Expressway.

On the need for a parking yard, the official said there had been several complaints from the traffic police and Regional Transport Office (North West) in Tondiarpet, about traffic congestion in the area. The parking of the container trucks had also been one of the reasons for several accidents on Suryanarayana Road.

He said a four-lane gateway for speedy completion of the security clearances for the trucks would be established adjacent to the parking yard. The gateway, which would use radio frequency identification tag-enabled (RFID) technology for the clearances, would cost another Rs.2 crore.

A senior official at the RTO (North West) said that with hundreds of container trucks parked on Surayanarayana Road, the space available for other road users is reduced. A study conducted by the RTO this year found that the parking of the container trucks was one of the causes for several accidents on the road. Inadequate illumination on the road, which is maintained by the Highways department, presence of slums in the area, and the lack of speed-breakers were other factors that resulted in the accidents.

The RTO official said Chennai Port Trust was allotted 11.26 acres of vacant land by Tiruvottiyur Municipality in 2007 for creating a parking yard for container trucks.

The official of the Chennai Port Trust said that though the Municipality had offered land for such a facility, it did not renew the lease. Hence, the port trust decided to develop its own parking yard.

The Deccan Chronicle  14.10.2010

The ‘modern’ bus shelters, promised three years back by Corporation of Chennai and the metropolitan transport corporation (MTC), remain only on paper. The common man for whom buses are the only affordable means of transport, still continues to languish under sun and rain, for most bus shelters are roofless.

Even though the corporation, under its city beautification project, erected a few modern stainless steel bus shelters near the newly-constructed secretariat and Marina beach, in other areas, people have to stand under damaged shelters.

The corporation proposal to modernise the bus shelter was first hit by legal hurdles and then was caught up in a policy decision on revenue sharing. The corporation has around 740 bus shelters, including 377 handed over by the MTC following a court order recently.

After two years of unsuccessful bidding, the Chennai corporation council recently approved the proposals to modernise 99 bus shelters. Under the project, shelters made of stainless steel would be erected according to the design specifications of the civic body. “Work orders have been issued to put up bus shelters at 99 locations, including some that were removed. The new bus shelters will be put up in a month,” mayor M. Subramanian said.

The private contractor quoted `2.04 lakh for erecting each of the shelters. The contractor will have to execute the work on a build-maintain-transfer (BMT) basis and generate revenue from advertisements on the top and rear-side panels. Overall, the corporation will earn `2.02 crore a year as revenue from the 99 bus shelters, he said, and added that tenders would be floated for all shelters in a phased manner.

The MTC also has launched a drive to modernise 500 bus shelters after the civic body approved its revised design for modernising bus shelters. “We are taking steps to modernise the bus shelters as the delay is resulting in a loss of revenue,” said a senior MTC official. The official pointed out that the MTC gets just `30,000 from each of its shelters annually.