Old national highways across Maharashtra are not built for high speeds and must be redesigned to curb accidents, highway design experts have said.
Since most drivers touch speeds of 150km/hr or more on these roads, there is an urgent need to improve their design or bring in speed curbs, they said. However, they pointed out that land acquisition and low budget allocation for these roads are an issue that affect the widening of maintenance of these old highways.
“We have single-lane, two-lane, four-lane, six-lane, and eight-lane roads, and now we also have four-lane, six-lane, and even 12-lane access-controlled roads. However, the speed limits are arbitrary and often not set with a scientific approach,” said a central road expert associated with the ministry of road transport. “The plan should be to set speed limits for all these categories of roads in consultation with the state.”
Jagdish Kadam, the CMD of Rajpath Infracon Private Limited, told : “There are horizontal and vertical improvement constraints because of reasons like land availability, growing cities, farmers’ resistance and forest land. So driving at a high speed is dangerous,” he said.
The future, he added, would be in creating more greenfield control access highways instead of upgrading old highways, which would be tedious as well as costly.