By Our Reporter
SHILLONG, Dec 22: The traffic snarls in Shillong are getting worse by the day.
Most parts of the capital city have been witnessing heavy traffic congestion over the past few weeks. The situation got out of hand on Wednesday following a hailstorm accompanied by a thunderstorm and heavy rainfall.
A city police officer attributed the traffic jams to the festive season with Shillong attracting Christmas shoppers from other parts of the district. The steady inflow of tourists from Assam and West Bengal has added to the problem, he said.
“It has become impossible for the traffic department to man the city’s roads with only 350 personnel,” he said, adding that the Home Guard personnel are helping in the traffic management.
“We can depute only about 200 personnel in one shift. We have 10-15 personnel who are doing the night patrolling. We are facing a shortage of manpower,” the official said.
He said regulating the traffic could have been easier had there been signaling lights. Regulating vehicles manually has its limitations, he added.
Major junctions such as Dhankheti, Laitumkhrah police point and Rhino point need more than one traffic policeman to regulate the vehicles efficiently, he said.
Senior traffic police officers said the odd-even formula will not work for the city as most people with connections manage to get passes to use their vehicles every day. They said the government will need to come up with an alternative to deal with the city’s problematic traffic.
A long-term policy would be to widen the roads wherever feasible and build more bypasses, the officers said. Other measures suggested included mandatory scrapping of vehicles that are 15 years old and disallowing the construction of schools, hospitals and other commercial buildings if there is no provision for proper parking space.
“Private nursing homes such as Bethany and Woodland Hospital and elite schools and colleges in Laitumkhrah and other prime locals do not have parking space. The main Secretariat, the additional Secretariat and many government buildings in Lachumiere have a similar issue,” a senior traffic police officer said.
“These are adding to the traffic woes in Shillong,” he added. He said the department is preparing a list of suggestions for the state government to work on creating parking lots across the city. One such idea is converting a plot at Barik Point into a multi-level parking lot.
The department has also underlined the need to set up a control centre with CCTVs for monitoring and regulating traffic in the city besides increasing the strength of the traffic personnel and identifying proper embarking and disembarking points for commercial vehicles.
“STPS buses should ideally not be allowed to ply in the city. Their services should be utilised for the rural areas,” the senior officer said, adding that the suggestions can be incorporated in the government’s reply to a PIL on traffic congestion pending in the High Court of Meghalaya.
The division bench of Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Justice Wanlura Diengdoh had recently asked the state government to submit a report on the measures undertaken to address the daily traffic jams in Shillong. This was based on the PIL filed by Philip Khrawbok Shati, a lawyer who sought answers to traffic congestions in the city.
Shati said in the PIL that pregnant women were being forced to deliver inside cars, critical patients were dying without being able to reach hospitals and children failing to reach schools on time. He also drew the court’s attention to long queues due to the irregular parking of “far too many cars than the roads can bear”.