Tiruchi Road bridge is ready
Bridge ready but road awaits repairsNightmare for motorists to continue on Tiruchi Road. Good news for those using the Tiruchi Road daily is that the bridge is ready but the road awaits repairs. The Railways had just completed its share of the rail overbridge work at Ondipudur after a three-year-long wait. The State Highways Department is gearing up to finish the approach road works by April 14 and throw the bridge open for light motor vehicle traffic.The Highways Minister, M.P. Saminathan, on Sunday inspected the bridge and oversaw the approach road works by the Highways officials. He said that the 1,029 m long bridge constructed at a total cost of Rs. 16.50 crore would be the longest and one of the widest bridges in the city.
This was expected to ease the bottleneck on the National Highway No. 67 and also end the hardship faced by the motorists who had to wait endlessly at the level-crossing.After completing the remaining portion of the work, the bridge will be thrown open for heavy vehicles by the end of April. Even as Coimbatoreans could heave a sigh of relief on the bridge getting ready, the bad news is that nothing had been done about the patchworks for the battered stretch of the Tiruchi Road that served as an approach on either side of the new bridge.The State Highways Department has commenced work to widen the dilapidated bridge at Kamatchipuram at an outlay of Rs. 210 lakh. The department had constructed two bridges with a capacity of two-lane each and was be 20.70 m wide with 1.725 m pedestrian pathway on either side of the bridge and 1.25 m centre median.
The department started the work before the road being handed over to the National Highways Authority of India.While it would finish the approach roads and make it motorable, the stretch between the bridge and Neelambur bypass road on one side and the stretch from the new bridge till the point where the vehicles were being diverted via Irugur is completely battered. The road relaying works would have to be taken up by the National Highways Authority of India, which was on the look out for contractors to carry out these emergency repair works. Until the patchworks are done or the stretch was re-laid, the motorists would have to be prepared for a bumpy ride before they could use the new flyover.
