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ShareMumbai: Like every other Mumbaikar worth the name, I rushed to try the magnificent Bandra-World Sea Link (let us call it that for as long as the controversy over its name continues) on the first day it was open to public.
At 11.30am, it took me 15 minutes to get across, but that was not unexpected. The entire journey from home to office took as long as it always does - 50 minutes and on the sea link, it was worth every minute. The same experience was repeated that night - 7 minutes on the bridge itself and a total of 40 minutes to get home. I scoffed at newspaper stories about massive traffic pile-ups the next day. C'mon, I was there.
So that night, the second day, I took the sea link again. It took 15 minutes to get from Colaba to Worli, which we reached at 10.30pm. It took one hour to get from Worli to the Bandra end of the bridge. All along the bridge, it was bumper to bumper travelling north. The south-bound section of the bridge was practically empty as people whizzed by, stopped, took pictures and strolled along. Our corridor was green with envy. Yes, the city looked superb, but we hardly that.
As we approached the end of the bridge, we found the cops had blocked one lane and were booking all the offenders and wrongdoers. Virtuous stuff that, doing their job and all that, but if you block one lane on a two lane road - well, you don't need to be a maths professor to figure how a bottleneck works: simply put, leads to madness. We got off the bridge to find no traffic at all past the toll booths. And on the other side of the bridge, where the going had been easy, was jam-packed. The entry to the bridge had been narrowed by the cops, so getting on was slow and torturous.
It made no sense. Nakabandi I can understand, just about. Drunk driving checks, I can understand, not really, though. Any of those could have been done at either end of the bridge. But on it, creating such a massive choke up? That's silly. But then, we've lived through the weird rules of Mumbai's traffic cops for years. Why should this new sea link make things any different, right?
