⚫43 minutes to drive 1.9km from Gariahat to Jodhpur Park around 1.15pm
⚫30 minutes to cover 3km from Mohammad Ali Park to Hatibagan at 3.30pm
Police had to put to use all the traffic management skills they have after a gap of several months as the volume of vehicles and people surged on the second last Saturday before Durga Puja.
This is something that Calcutta is familiar with in the run-up to all Durga Pujas but 2020 when the scare of Covid had broken the pattern.
A large number of people stepped out of their homes on Saturday — to eat, shop, meet friends and family.
Such habits were almost missing last Durga Puja season.
The run-up to the Puja is a traffic nightmare anyway because there are many road grabber pandals and several thoroughfares are constricted because of barricades or scaffoldings to make room for billboards.
With kerbside parking lots packed, there was a congestion on roadsides. Cars crawled to find room to sneak in.
“The pressure of both vehicles and pedestrians was very high today. If we held back the pedestrians from crossing over, the kerbs would be overcrowded and if we frequently allowed pedestrians to cross the road, that reduced the average vehicular speed. We had to balance out both,” said an officer at Gariahat crossing.
Traffic had to be diverted through several pockets of north and south Calcutta.
“We had to divert city-bound traffic on Central Avenue from BB Ganguly Street as there was a lot of congestion at Chowringhee and New Market area in the afternoon” said an officer of headquarter traffic guard.
Be it the Hathibagan market in north Calcutta or Gariahat in the south, people traveling through the shopping destinations were the worst hit.
Traffic crawled through Central Avenue, Shyambazar five-point crossing, Southern Avenue, Rashbehari Avenue, Gariahat Road, Prince Anwar Shah Road.
The damp weather and heavy rainfall over the last two weekends had possibly restricted the footfall at some of these places.
But a sunny Saturday burst the dam of people.
“After a long time I am seeing so many people at Dakshinapan today. As there is a large volume of pedestrian movement, the Jadavpur-bound traffic has been slow. We are tweaking the signal timings accordingly,” an officer posted at Dhakuria said on Saturday evening.
Many Calcuttans who thought the third-wave scare would keep the shops and markets empty said they were surprised with the turnout on the roads.
“Like last year, this year too I have completed my shopping online. But for my mother’s sari I wanted to buy it after checking out the fabric personally. (But) most of the sari shops on Rashbehari Avenue were teeming with shoppers,” said Naina Ghosh, a resident of Jadavpur.