Mail News Service
Jamshedpur, Sept 8: Traffic snarls have become common place in major city thoroughfares with traffic police more concentrated on trapping and fining COVID and other protocol benders than in ensuring smooth flow of man and machine. Traffic bottlenecks on the ever busy Jaiprakash Setu, popularly known as the Mango Bridge is a regular feature where traffic police frantically swing their batons in the air, run around blowing their whistles but achieve nothing except raise commuters’ miseries and accompanying frayed tempers, curses and exasperated honks of motorists. This appalling condition was more pronounced on Wednesday afternoon as traffic along Mango Hanuman Mandir Road to the Mango roundabout, the entire Dimna and Old Purulia Roads leading to and from the bridge were chock a block with stagnant traffic that attempted to crawl but was thwarted at a distance of one inch or less, so-much-so that inching forward became an exercise in futility.
The traffic woes are compounded as heavy vehicles rush into the city from every possible route the moment ‘No Entry’ is lifted, trying to make a dash for destinations, breaking all logical semblances of traffic norms in the most illogical manner to meet killer deadlines. The result is, needless to mention, traffic jams that are always avoidable under the supervision of agile traffic cops who are these days busy cutting challans than controlling the mayhem along the bridge. The seriousness of it all was very much in evidence as an ambulance got stuck in this traffic mesh and no amount of siren by a sweating driver could clear the route for this emergency vehicle to make its way to the hospital.
It would be rather foolhardy to contemplate that crossing the bridge towards Sakchi would be the temporary end to a permanent misery. Trucks roll along to and from Bhuinyadih via the roundabout at the bus terminus leaving no space for other vehicles to move across thus adding to the jamming problems. If that was not enough, bus operators park their buses on the bridge or near it or even on the road to pick up passengers to make a mockery of physical distancing norms in the process of ‘collecting as many passengers as they come.’ Then again, there is the perennial sight of cars and other assorted vehicles gleefully parked alongside the Mango and Sakchi ends of the road to and from the bridge to add to the confusion. The old bridge that is used by smart alecks to rush across to either side of their travel and emerging from the wrong portion become the cork in the fizzing bottle-necked traffic. It is time that the traffic cops pulled up their socks or whatever and lived upto their capabilities of avoiding brazen, unnerving and debilitating traffic chaos that was witnessed for three maddening hours at the Mango Bridge on Wednesday since afternoon. Let sanity or whatever is left of it prevail in these scary, COVID pandemic times or the hierarchy of the viral waves too, like the traffic jams, will become a part of routine life.