CG Road: On the way to Teen Darwaja?

As I suffer the CG Road daily by living off it, I must admit that it has made me a calmer and wiser person. As I go past broken roads, illegal parking and general mess created by lawlessness of India, I have no option but to intellectualise my frustration and observe the chaos around me as an interesting interplay of systems.

As CG Road is now getting revamped, I am forced to imagine that there is some invisible method in the apparent madness of reducing the parking drastically and creating facilities for goons and encroachers, and as an eternal optimist, the ray of hope that I have now discovered a possibility of the urban planner subtly using parking as a use-modifier for a zone.

As someone living in the inner lane opening onto CG Road, I am already getting to see the future outcome of the reduced parking as all the lanes are now choked with CG Road users parking their cars and two wheelers.

The current parking problem of CG Road is not caused by urban design failure as it can be clearly attributed to greedy builders aided by corrupt officials and supported by criminal politicians because it was a residential zone where illegal parking-less commercials were allowed to be constructed and sold. 

If the urban plan zoning was not violated by builders, it could have remained a wonderful tree-lined road with bungalows on both sides where commercial shopping stands today.

The most damaging lawless act that should have been nipped in the bud by erstwhile Municipal Corporation was the unauthorised conversion of what was approved as ground floor parking into shops, a move that made crores for builders.

Though amends could have been made by honourable High Court by coming down heavily on the illegal construction, but as state obliged the builders with impact fee loophole to fool public yet again, the matter is now too muddled to be solved by an action of the state, but for a new opportunity that the yet-again parking-problem-agnostic  development of CG Road has produced laterally.

If I try and construct a model of CG Road to extrapolate future scenario, we now have proactive traffic police, increase of vehicles and the city offering new shopping areas, it is likely that the new design could be a smart move to achieve a lateral solution, and that too with some poetic justice!

It is clear that CG Road is already facing competition from the SG Highway and many other emerging prime shopping areas, the new design could be the final straw that will break the camel’s back as it will turn CG Road into a parking nightmare for an Indian shopper who loves window-shopping more than actually buying and hence needs a lot of time to explore. 

This hopefully will reduce viability for shops of CG Road and it will also prevent them to hold sales, a critical business strategy for the modern shopping houses that are under pressure from online shopping. And as they will cease to be viable, the road will be relieved of the pressure it feels today.

As history tells us that we have always found a way of breaking the law, large footpaths await Teen Darwaja kind of encroachment to emerge and make life more difficult for me and you too, as I will have to get even more philosophical in my prose to bear it!

City-based science nomad who tries to find definitive answers  
samir.shukla@icloud.com