NOIDA: For a decade, Ajay Chauhan lived in Gaur City 2’s 14th Avenue and commuted daily to Gurgaon. Last Jan, he gave up. The drive through tailbacks on the Gaur Chowk stretch took more than six hours a day, worse still through the monsoon. So, he decided to move closer to his workplace. Most residents have no such option.A trip that should take 15 to 20 minutes regularly consumes one and a half to two hours during office time, residents said, blaming narrow, broken roads, missing traffic lights, wrong-side driving and encroachments on the service lanes and from a weekly market that spills onto the carriageway.Greater Noida Authority has been building an underpass at Gaur Chowk to ease the bottleneck, but its construction has been delayed repeatedly and is now expected around Diwali. Residents say an underpass will not be enough to decongest the intersection that is flanked by residential condominiums, malls and schools. Some say an elevated road from Parthala Chowk to Galaxy Vega Society was needed as only a grade-separated route could absorb the roughly 25,000 vehicles passing through daily.
Gaur City is a 237-acre integrated township in Greater Noida West, with nearly 1.5 lakh residents. Commercial hubs include Gaur City Mall, which houses a nine-screen multiplex, City Plaza and City Galleria. Launched around 2010-2011, it was among the earliest large-scale planned developments in Greater Noida West.“I moved into Gaur City 2 in 2015. Back then there were very few people here. The traffic on the roads was sparse and my commute to office would be a little more than an hour,” Chauhan said. “Within three years of moving there, Gaurs Group started giving possession of the apartments and the population swelled but the infrastructure remained the same. Before I left the township last year, I was spending over 6 hours daily commuting due to snarls.“A resident of Gaur Aishwaryam in Gaur City 2, Deepak Gupta, dubbed it a township full of problems. “Broken roads, no traffic lights, wrong-side driving, encroachment, you name an issue, we have everything here. The roads are encroached by makeshift furniture, utility, decoration shops leading to traffic snarls and we need a permanent fix to this problem,” said Gupta.The congestion worsens on weekends, when the service lane opposite to Gaur City turns into a vibrant market every Saturday.DCP traffic (GB Nagar) Abhay Kumar Mishra told TOI that the four-lane underpass (two lanes on both sides) at Gaur Chowk was devised to address the traffic situation in the area. The problem occurs as people use the Pusta road in place of the Parthala main road, which leads to traffic spillover till Gaur Chowk. Apart from that, wrong-side driving is rampant on Pusta road. “We have appealed several times against wrong-side driving and also carry out periodic drives, but people don’t follow rules. The only option is to issue challans,” said Mishra.
