16.7.08

Chennai to get spruced up Roads

Come monsoon and Chennai's frequently-cursed roads will blossom — literally. The Chennai Corporation is giving a complete makeover to a majority of the city’s arterial roads, sprucing them up with sparkling new medians that will be topped with a green cover and colourful bus shelters that will make up for the advertising space lost due to the pulling down of hoardings. In the initial phase, the corporation has taken up 69 roads to provide them granite medians. Wide granite slabs will replace the loose kerbs put up by the traffic police on important stretches to streamline vehicular movement and to ensure lane discipline among the motorists. On some other specific roads, granite slabs will be set up on request from the traffic police.According to sources in the corporation, work on 20 roads has already been completed so far while in the remaining stretches, it is in various stages of completion. Running on top of the medians will be a green cover, with each road getting three species of plants — clerodendron, tabernaemontana and ixora chinensis. After the monsoon, the congested roads will witness a burst of green. At least 30 km will be covered during the current fiscal year.The contractors have been asked to take up the sapling planting themselves and work has been completed in a few stretches including Anna Nagar and Egmore. The corporation is also taking precautions against drivers ramming into the granite slabs: reflective pavement markers or road studs will be anchored on the road surface for lane-marking and delineation for nighttime visibility. The reflective panels will consist of a number of lenses containing single or dual prismatic cubes capable of providing internal reflection.It’s not just the medians that are being spruced up. Another eyesore on Chennai’s roads, the dilapidated bus shelters, will also make way for a swanky version. “Jindal Steels Limited has bagged the contract for three of the four sets of bus shelters. The construction of shelters will begin as soon as the project gets the official nod from the elected council during its meeting this month-end. The newlook steel shelters will have a clock, the schedules of the buses and 12 steel seats.

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