An irritating ordeal I faced on my usual Bangalore-Chennai drive

Hope to see all diversions fixed on both the Hosur and Chittoor routes or BCE officially open end-to-end soon.

BHPian glovins2004 recently shared this with other enthusiasts:

An ordeal never ends while commuting between Bangalore and Chennai, and vice versa.

A couple of days back, I was driving from Chennai to Bangalore after a brief home visit. I was in a dilemma about whether to choose the Krishnagiri or Chittoor route. As per Google Maps, the Chittoor route was faster by 15 minutes at that point in time compared to the Krishnagiri route. However, I’m not a fan of the Chittoor route due to the slow average speed along the Ranipet to Chittoor stretch. On the contrary, I’m fed up with the ever-increasing deviations on the Krishnagiri route.

Finally, I made up my mind to choose the Chittoor route to see how much of an actual difference it makes. A few weeks back, I was able to do door-to-door from Porur to OMBR Layout in 6 hours 30 minutes with a 35-minute break via Krishnagiri. I started at 6 PM from Porur and parked the car at home in OMBR Layout by 12:30 AM. This was on a Sunday evening, and surprisingly, there wasn’t much traffic throughout. Otherwise, it would easily take 7 to 8 hours with a 45 to 50-minute break in the current road and traffic conditions.

I started from my home at Porur by 8 PM. It was a Tuesday evening. There was moderate traffic until the Sriperumbudur toll, but there was a large pile-up at one of the deviations. I spent almost 20 minutes crossing that stretch. After that, I could maintain a good average speed until Ranipet, barring the frustrating deviation.

Here comes the surprise in the middle of the night.

It was an uneventful, smooth drive until we reached the TN/AP border check post. As I was rolling out of the barricades, I could see many trucks piled up in the left lane and some of them blocking the right lane, except for a small gap on the right shoulder. I waited for a minute, but there was no sign of anyone moving. Meanwhile, I saw a car trying to turn back, but I wasn’t sure why.

I asked one of the truck drivers. He said that an oil tanker had broken down in the middle of the road, blocking both ways, and there was no way it would be cleared soon.

It was quite disappointing and frustrating. Some people told me to go all the way back to Ranipet, while others suggested going through Vellore. The latter made sense.

We turned on Maps for Vellore and followed the suggested route. Meanwhile, I could see some other cars also following the same route.

As this detour was going to eat up more time, I changed the destination back to Bangalore. Surprisingly, it routed us back to the Chittoor route via the Vellore–Chittoor Road. At some point, it was showing BCE, but since it was already midnight, I didn’t want to take any risks. Hence, I turned right towards Chittoor Road and rejoined NH69. Overall, we lost around 45 minutes in this ordeal.

Hope to see all diversions fixed on both the Hosur and Chittoor routes or BCE officially open end-to-end soon.

CAUTION: Be extremely careful while passing through the stretch from the concrete barricade to the Bomma Samudram railway crossing. There is an elevation on the road where visibility to the other side is nil, which might lead to a disaster.

Drive safe - Vino

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