Karachi to have more stop signs, cat’s eyes and zebra crossings

CDGK to spend around Rs20 million on road marking, officials believe existing projects should be maintained instead.

KARACHI: New roads, bridges and signal-free corridors have changed the road landscape of the city, with many people losing way in the areas they seldom visit. Also, people are irked by the unexpected speed bump that emerges out of nowhere in the areas they live in or visit regularly.

Now there is a solution to the problem. The City District Government, Karachi (CDGK) is planning on spending around Rs20 million on road marking to improve traffic movement in the metropolis. City administrator Fazlur Rehman had on November 1 approved the idea and issued an official order (Admin/Secy/CDGK/2010/64) in this regard.

The official order read that the road markings on the city’s four signal-free corridors were either not up to the mark or missing.

Municipal services department EDO Masood Alam told The Express Tribune that the city’s 26,000-kilometre roads, links, service and inner roads will be marked under the plan. But the task might not include roads under control of town municipal administrations.

He said that the city administrator has said in his order that CDGK’s works and services department EDO engineer A Rasheed Mughal would carry on the task, while Alam would assist them regarding technical aspects of the project. Soon, tenders would be invited to kick off the project.

Mughal said road markings were a huge task to complete and it requires millions of rupees. The availability of funds would determine the scope of the project but it would need more than Rs10 million if they city’s main arteries were included, he explained.

TCP traffic control additional district officer Naveed Izhar said the TCP had spent Rs2 million on the installation of spikes mainly on U-turns, beside main roads, to prevent the wrong entry of any vehicle. But almost all the spikes have either been broken or stolen. “So a huge amount of public money was lost,” said Izhar.

Meanwhile, TCP district officer refused to comment on the matter and advised to approach other officers instead.

A CDGK transport and communication department official told The Express Tribune that the road marking task is in fact the TCP’s responsibility. “The TCP was responsible for ensuring execution of certain operations such as lane marking, traffic-signal installation and maintenance, installation of cat eyes, guiding signs, road signs, informative signs, zebra crossings, stop lines, yellow-edge markings and many others,” the official revealed.

He said that CDGK’s head office, commonly known as the Civic Centre, was in a dilapidated condition. “The staircases, elevators and lavatories exhibit that tragedy.” Conceiving newer projects and allocating funds for them was easy, but the actual construction and implementation is tougher, he said. “The CDGK should concentrate more on the repair and maintenance of existing projects rather than spending millions of rupees on projects that they cannot maintain.”

Transport and communication department EDO Atiq Baig said he was not aware of any official order yet. He said he would try to seek the city administrator’s point of view about what was the spirit of ordering such projects.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 10^th, 2010.