Chennai's own rollercoaster gateway

Going round and round and round…. One can have a lot of fun driving and arriving back where one started. That’s Kathipara Grade Separator for you. I give it to the planners or rather the developers of this superfluous structure that they have signboards at every point where a driver might be confounded. So, it really is not possible to end where you began, unless you intend to.

 

While the utility of a flyover or an underpass is construably more apparent, this twisting and turning maze of roads piled over one another, to ease congestion in a single crossroads, eluded the grasp of my reasoning. Like this wordy expression of my bewilderment, the ride on ‘Kathipara’ was fun; however it seemed unlikely an adult mind would reconcile it on the justification of ‘fun’. After all, money and material and energy were spent on building it, for three whole years. And god bless a cyclist or a pedestrian trying to cross the junction.

 

Apart from such trivial concerns about a minor set of people (The Kathipara, after all, was built for the greater common good), what really stumped me about the ‘grade separator’ is how having a maze of roads actually made it easier to navigate for a driver than a straightforward intersection.

 

On my third trip on this roller coaster, it dawned on me. Those clever urban transport planners. They have our motorists figured out. They knew it wasn’t possible to restrain vehicles within lanes, or behind signals, in an orderly manner. They decided to have fun, sending motorists around in circles, leaving them with no choice but to cling on for dear life and follow the signboards religiously!

 

What’s more, such a set up allowed for plenty of tarmac to stall the vehicles on before the real junction point – the bottleneck at the foot of the bridge – was cleared out for the ‘splash’! The profundity of it awed me so much that Kathipara turned into poetry, only too elite to be of much use. Imagine if our motorists, overjoyed by the sudden gift of concrete to vroom on, added more to their already sprawling collection of wheels. Imagine if all those wheels gridlocked the entire ‘grade separator’. The minority pedestrians and cyclists would have a ball underneath the flyovers, crossing and reaching work without having to look out for a hit and run every second!