My way or the Highway

Up until his death in the summer of last year, Nazroo Narejo was a name commuters feared when driving to Interior Sindh. Narejo was known for numerous highway robberies and car-snatching incidents. Nowadays, commuters face a very different safety problem, a structural one.

The first phase of the M9 motorway linking Karachi to Hyderabad is under construction replacing the existing Super Highway. One might wonder how construction of a motorway is a problem for the region. The problem isn’t construction itself, but the temporary diversions that have been created.

There are a total of seven unmonitored diversions on the way from Karachi to Hyderabad and vice versa, each lasting several kilometres. Trucks, cars alike follow no particular driving pattern (as done so on the highway itself) creating major traffic disruptions. A journey that would usually take two hours, takes up to four, sometimes even five hours, just because there is no one to monitor the traffic flow.

A usual highway pattern involved having trucks and heavy vehicles on the slow left lane with fast moving vehicles on the right. With the numerous diversions, trucks do not follow the same pattern as the diversions involve muddy broken roads with little space to accommodate one heavy vehicle, let alone two. Truck drivers use the lack of monitoring as an opportunity to overtake one another at will creating two way truck lanes with all the traffic jumbled up behind. Car drivers respond with attempts to overtake on a road that is broken and devoid of any space resulting in traffic collisions.

One might argue this is a standard problem faced when roads are being constructed, but the problem doesn’t end here. Certain trial patches of the new motorway are already constructed which accommodate the heavy traffic blocks resulting out of the previous diversions. These patches take on so much traffic load that there may not remain a fully functioning road when the construction of the first phase ends.

The motorway police, the Frontier Works Organisation (FWO) and the National Highway Authority (NHA) are busy playing politics and passing the responsibility on one another. Take for instance last Wednesday’s incident where the tyre of a tanker loaded with chemicals burst due to which it lost control and overturned, sparking a deadly blaze killing two people while burning 29 other vehicles. There were no police to monitor the resulting traffic jam, let alone ambulances or fire engines. Each of them were stuck in that very traffic jam.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 12^th, 2016.