It turns out that 22% to 37% of the four road stretches tested by TOI were either average or had poor ride quality. These roads include from Judge Bungalow to APMC Junction, Ethithi Crossroads Gujarat University, Navrangpura to APMC Crossroads and Gujarat University to Navrangpura Junction.
Safe, motorable and reliable roads for commuting are the right of every citizen. The time has come for AMC to commit to building high quality, long lasting public roads. To ensure this, parameters such as Road Roughness Index should become a standard for road quality audits in the city. States like Greater Hyderabad and Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporations and MP have already adopted the norm. Ahmedabad should also move in that direction.
The app detects road bounce vibrations and calculates road roughness based on concrete or asphalt. A concrete road to be classified as ‘excellent’ under the roughness index must have a vertical height of less than 2,200 in a 100 m section, i.e. small or large bumps. An asphalt road should have 2,000. Similarly, an asphalt road is classified as ‘average’ if it has between 2,000 and 3,000 steep 100 meters. If this number exceeds 3,000 bumps the route is classified as ‘poor’.
Keeping this in mind, the 5.7 km stretch between Atithi Crossroads and Gujarat University has 63% road stretch which is good, 34% has average ride quality while 3% rated the stretch as “poor”. is found. Similarly, the ride between Gujarat University and Navrangpura Railway Crossing accounts for 13% of the road with poor quality, while it is 11% in terms of distance between Judge Bungalow and APMC Junction.
“Most of the roads in the city have been rebuilt and even repaired as per IRC standards and the roads laid by the road and building department of Gujarat. Patchwork has been done on many roads. Particularly in the western region which may cause some distortions. But the overall ride quality is as per the standards,” said a senior official of the AMC Roads and Bridges Department. He also noted that the app-based roughness index measurement usually does not differentiate between speed bumps or manholes, with roads fluctuating as part of the roughness index.
Sudhir Khatri, 27, a restaurant owner in Prahladnagar, says, “I usually take Shivranjani to Shreyas Crossing Marg to drop my daughter off for martial arts classes. I noticed that the road was dug up recently and then randomly patched after rain. Even my SUV’s suspension gets bogged down when driving on that part. Kavi Sachdeva, 13, a school student from Vejalpur, says, “I ride my cycle to my tuition classes and I feel that the internal roads in residential areas are poorly maintained. I sometimes get mild back pain after 10 minutes of riding.”
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