Big Traffic Relief For Mumbai Motorists As Kandivali Subway Work On Western Express Highway Finally Ends

Mumbai motorists using the Western Express Highway (WEH) can heave a huge sigh of relief as their traffic nightmares, which lasted almost two years, have finally come to an end. The Akurli subway widening work at Kandivali is all but completed and the barricades placed on the highway have been removed.

The barricades had reduced the north-bound carriageway of the highway to two lanes, instead of four, leading to a bottleneck for vehicles travelling from south Mumbai and Bandra to the western suburbs of Borivali and Dahisar. To ease the congestion, traffic police would open two additional lanes on the other side during peak traffic hours. This stop-gap solution would lead to traffic pileups on the south-bound carriageway, too, at Kandivali.

Motorists travelling towards Borivali would complain that it took anywhere between 20 minutes to an hour, depending on the time of day, to cross the 1.5-2km stretch between Malad and Kandivali, with the Samata Nagar Police Station junction being the major issue.

The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) had begun work on widening the Akurli subway, which connects Kandivli station to the highway and Lokhandwala residential area. The project work, according to MMRDA, got delayed owing to an unexpected discovery of a gas pipeline on the Borivali side of the subway. The pipeline measuring 300mm in diameter, which serves areas from Dahisar to Bandra, had to be moved for the work to be completed.

Union minister and recently elected Mumbai North MP Piyush Goyal, along with MLA Atul Bhatkhalkar, MMRDA officials and local residents, had inspected the work site earlier this month.

Announcing the inauguration, Goyal said, “Today is a significant day not just for North Mumbai, but for the entire city. Since I started campaigning in North Mumbai, I noticed the severe traffic issues on the Western Express Highway, with hours-long traffic jams on both sides…During the election period, I was deeply saddened to see this and made a promise that in the first 100 days of the new government, during PM Modi’s third term, we would speed up the work and resolve this issue, providing relief to the people of Mumbai from the daily traffic jams…”