Fewer buses to use Kashmere Gate ISBT
NEW DELHI: To curb air pollution and decongest areas around Kashmere Gate, the Delhi government has planned to shed the load of Kashmere Gate ISBT by almost 36%.
A week after lieutenant governor Anil Baijal directed chief secretary MM Kutty to look into “rationalising” locations of bus depots for inter-state buses in the city, the transport department and the traffic police have come up with a proposal to divert 673 inter-state buses from Kashmere Gate ISBT to Anand Vihar and Sarai Kale Khan ISBTs. The move is going to impact nearly 30,000 daily passengers.
“We plan to do this because most buses coming from neighbouring states are old diesel buses. Pushing these to the city’s periphery would help improve the air quality,” a transport department official said. While 563 buses that take the Shahdara route will be diverted to Anand Vihar, 110 buses will be shifted to the Sarai Kale Khan terminal.
Explaining how the plan would decongest the area, Garima Bhatnagar, joint commissioner of police (traffic) said, “If the proposal gets a go ahead then it would unclog the Kashmere Gate flyover, Ring Road, the road that goes towards Tis Hazari, Civil Lines and even the road to Old Delhi. Besides, it would lead to reduction in footfall which would mean presence of fewer hawkers and inter-mediate public transport like auto rickshaws that are clogging the roads.”
She added that the timings of the buses are clubbed which adds to the chaos. “Changing the engineering of the road is not possible to clear the bottleneck around Kashmere Gate because of its proximity to monuments. There will be a meeting on this soon,” Bhatnagar said.
Experts, however, expressed their concerns that it would only make Anand Vihar more polluted. “This will help to decongest. But, Anand Vihar is a pollution hotspot in Delhi. Developing new terminal areas with good connectivity for seamless transfers to local and cleaner transport systems can be considered,” said Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director at Centre for Science & Environment.