A road with high safety-quotient

There is something wonderful about the small stretch of road that flows between St Anthony School Ground on the right and Railway School on the left as one travels from the Ajni Railway Over Bridge (RoB) eastward. The bent stretch of divided cement road opens into the intersection that connects us to Wanjari Nagar on the right, TB Ward on the left, and Medical College Square straight ahead less than a kilometer away. In the past so many years, I do not remember to have ever reported a single major accident in this stretch of the road. No matter how much in hurry people may be, somehow, everybody falls in line and passes through this stretch without any incident -- mishap, so to say.

Yes, for years, I do not remember a single major -- or even minor -- accident in this stretch of the road. I may not know much about road designing, except that I have been fortunate to have seen countless very well-designed roads in scores of cities across the world, forcing me to think about the road-architecture seriously. Leaning heavily on that observation, my mind darts back to this stretch of road in Ajni -- just about half a kilometer in curved length. This stretch may not have all those classic attributes of a good road-architecture, such as broad carriage-ways on both sides of the median, shoulders of reasonable width on both sides, reasonably wide pavements on both sides et al. This stretch is just a simple, cemented road with a neat median and sensibly designed pavements on both sides.

That’s all. Yet, with such a simple design, this road has often attracted me for its very high safety-quotient. As a journalist who has spent fifty years reporting in Nagpur as the base city, I really, really, really do not remember any major accident having taken place along this stretch of road. Architects and town-planners may have their own way of looking at things. They may have some professionally-burnished ideas about this stretch of road. But for a layman like me, this stretch offers a truly safe travel somehow. I have travelled along this stretch for countless thousands of times.

On one occasion that has got etched on my memory distinctly, I was rushing with whole family in the car to face a medical emergency -- on way to the Government Medical College Hospital (GMCH). Yet, in this stretch of road, I had to fall in line, and pass through it like a good boy. And even though our father badly injured in a road accident lay in the emergency ward of the GMCH, I had to endure the disciplined traffic in this stretch of the road, thanks to its design, so to say. But even in those two minutes, despite the mental rush I -- and each one of us -- was experiencing in that traumatic moment, I did not feel harassed. Those two minutes did not make me angry or frustrated.

That was how this stretch of the road treats the users -- with a sense of discipline good design has achieved. I had touched upon this stretch once in passing in this column, and now choose to write once again on it. I seek pardon for this indulgence. It may not be possible for our town-planners and civic authorities to replicate such a faultless design in other roads and intersections, thanks to several limiting factors. Yet, I feel motivated to suggest to those good men and women in charge of the city to take a good, serious, sincere and professional look at this stretch of road in Ajni and contemplate if some good aspects could be factored in altering approach to road-design in as many places as possible elsewhere in the city. This is, of course, a layman’s suggestion. May I request professionals to indulge in some unbiased thinking on the issue!.