Team-BHP - West Bengal - A treasure for tourists

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samba (Post 5936682)

Visited Purulia twice in the last 10 days- The Palash bloom is at its peak!

Route 2-

Kolkata- Ghatshila - Galudi - Manbazar -Purulia.

This route is highly recommended; the road from Galudi to Manbazar is super scenic and enjoyable.

The Palash Bloom- This year, due to the early onslaught of the summer, the Palash bloom is at its peak now. Those who plan to visit, do plan before 15th March.

Lovely TL as always and the photos do full justice to the beauty of the palash blooms. I will be retracing your steps this weekend - we had to push back our trip by a week. Aakash Hilltop didn't have availability on our dates so we will be staying in Sonkupi though not at Palash Dungri (I made sure of that based on your feedback). Will take the Ghatshila - Galudih route that you have suggested. This is likely to be the Safari's last highway trip before it completes a year with me on 22nd March.

This post is not about any destination in West Bengal, but to reach any place in Bengal, we need to use the highways. Sharing the current status on what we encounter daily on the highways of Bengal!

After paying road tax, & hefty amount of toll tax what we get on the highways of Bengal?

Random barricades are placed unscientifically. These barricades cause a lot of bottle necks and slows down the traffic, plus this results in traffic jams.

4-5 km or even longer traffic jams are common every day after evening when one is required to enter or exit Kolkata. The truck movements are poorly managed.

Untrained civic police on the highways have no clue when to stop a car to let the pedestrians cross the road. A lot of rear-endings are common on the highways as the cars stop abruptly as asked by the civic police to help the pedestrians cross the road. They have no clue when to stop a car or how to judge the speed of an incoming car, or if there is any bigger vehicle behind a small car! In many cases, the small car managed to stop in time, but the bigger vehicle behind it couldn't stop in time and caused accidents.

Since last year, cows blocking a couple of lanes on the Bombay road (NH16) during the evening is a new menace.

Eunuchs are asking for money at every toll Plaza! Why not give them the job of a toll operator? They can have a job with dignity rather than begging!

I am not even going into the speed limit part, where there are boards mentioning 35 km/hr on the NH! Those are the favorite spots for the cops with their speed gun!

A simple dashcam grab for ref-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aW5IDafs1k

Samba
While you are absolutely right in identifying an age old problem, we must identify the correct forum for the issue to be addressed. The police feels that the primary pivot on which safety can be induced to the users is the pivot of inconvenience, rendered through these barricades. They are intellectually so impoverished that this is the highest thinking they can exhibit. Little do they realise how downright uncivilised this thinking is, in addition to it being very very unsafe.
But we must find a more relevant forum where Bengal bureaucrats, politicians and other highway stakeholders are readers or participants. Not sure whether airing our views here will have much effect.
As far as those long traffic jams are concerned, they will remain as these highways carry a lot of the “through traffic” from South India to the North East. Probably we will have to wait for the Kharagpur Morgram expressway to start.

Just the other day I went for a Sunday morning drive to Kolaghat and here are my observations:

1. Zero lane adherence. Everyone is just swinging between lanes often times quite dangerously. Others are simply driving on the middle of the white lane markings.

2. Minimal usage of indicators while performing lane change.

3. Tailgating

4. Overtaking very close and then immediately moving into my lane, almost leading to sideswiping.

5. Incessant honking

6. Lot of slow cars and trucks on the right lane, and battery operated rickshaws on the left lane

7. Lot of barricading at smaller intersections leading to unnecessary traffic snarls

8. Bazaars moving closer to the main road.

9. Over-speeding and zero patience

The most disciplined drivers I found were the inter state trucks! Private cars were the worst of the lot, followed by commercial pick up trucks and buses.

Barricades are not just a menace in Bengal highways. Even in city streets, barricades are placed on the rightmost lane at every intersection even when the road is narrow enough to create a bottleneck. It forces the drivers to change lane unnecessarily, thus creating congestion. When the authorities are teaching driving discipline by penalizing people without seatbelt or helmet, who will teach them what should and shouldn't be done to maintain proper flow of traffic and ease unnecessary congestion.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dibyendu Bose (Post 5938963)

Samba
While you are absolutely right in identifying an age old problem, we must identify the correct forum for the issue to be addressed.

Respectfully disagree.

A lot of posts in the forum would never appear if they were only addressed to the correct forum, which presumably in this case, would be a PIL against the state? Because its the state police & civic volunteers associated who use this dangerous barricade system, instead of actually managing and controlling traffic.

And a PIL would probably do nothing, unless it is enforced top down by an NGTesque body. Or God forbid, if something unfortunate happens because of the barricades.

There is no harm in flagging justified concerns and sharing and amplifying well rounded viewpoints. That is what the forum, and social media by and large, is for.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samba (Post 5938077)

After paying road tax, & hefty amount of toll tax what we get on the highways of Bengal?

Random barricades are placed unscientifically. These barricades cause a lot of bottle necks and slows down the traffic, plus this results in traffic jams.

Absolutely agree Samba, the barricades make life miserable in Highways or in City Roads. The use of barricades was originally to reduce pedestrian fatalities and divert vehicular movement. Now the police have adjusted these to randomly reduce the lane/drivable space and squeeze traffic to create artificial bottlenecks and reduce speed. These are downright dangerous objects on road at night, since most of them do not have reflectors / broken reflectors. :Frustrati

Those who have driven on the southern part of Kolkata in/around Diamond Harbour Road will know the menace of barricades, coupled with unscientific traffic signals and artificial narrowing of roads to accommodate an unusable Metro. Coupled this with random parking across the market places throughout the road (which is mostly a No Parking zone) and all types of commercial activities being performed on the road - you get a perfect recipe for disaster ! Not surprising that this zone is earmarked as one of the most frequent accident prone area in Kolkata.

**End of rant**

The national highways in West Bengal in most places pass through very congested localities. Either the lack of underpass/junction or the unwillingness of people living in these areas to cover that extra distance for a safe crossing leads to people suddenly running across the road and leading to accidents. Now the government instead of addressing the root cause or disciplining the people have resorted to penalizing the motorists by putting these barricades all over the highways across West Bengal resulting in life risk hazard for the motorist. As Samba has rightly pointed out and I have noticed too that sometimes the Civic police will stop the oncoming high speed traffic just to let one person cross the highway. Well, we can only let our frustrations out here as long as appeasement takes priority over motorist's safety and pain!

The roads are for drivers to drive, footpaths are for people to walk and underpasses /overbridges/ zebra crossing are there to facilitate safe road crossing.

The WB administration is forgetting the basics of road usage leading to such apathy and anarchy that is so prevalent on the roads. All footpaths are busy commercial zones with unlawful hawkers threatening legitimate businesses that are situated on the sidewalks. Add to this the auto & rickshaw stands coupled with parking menace AND the haphazard placement of BARRICADES.....the perfect recipe for disaster. We need to immediately overhaul the mentality of our leaders that roads are not a commercial zone, rather it is a medium which facilitates trade & commerce.