Ahmedabad: Every road you take, we’ll be joltin’ you

AHMEDABAD: Each day the municipal corporation of the city releases a list of roads that have been resurfaced. But how smooth or less bone rattling is your ride to office or home? In the last few days the ‘roughness index’ — cumulative deformations of a road stretch — of a few of the important city roads was determined using a special mobile app used recently by municipal officials of Mumbai, Greater Hyderabad and even the MP road development corporation(MPRDC).

It turns out that 22% to 37% of the four road stretches that TOI tested were either average or had poor ride quality. These roads included Judges Bungalow to APMC Junction, Aithithi Crossroads to Gujarat University, Navrangpura to APMC Crossroads and Gujarat University to Navrangpura Junction.

The app Road Bounce detects vibrations and calculates the roughness index of a road depending whether they are concrete or asphalt. A concrete road must have fewer than 2,200 vertical elevations, that is, small or large bumps, in a 100-meter section to be classed as 'excellent' under the roughness index. An asphalt road must have 2,000. Similarly, an asphalt road is classified as 'average' if it has between 2,000 and 3,000 vertical rises in a 100-meter stretch. The route is classified as 'bad' if this number surpasses 3,000 bumps.
Keeping that in mind, the 5.7km stretch between Atithi Crossroads and Gujarat University, has a 63% road stretch that is good, while 34% has average ride quality while a 3% stretch is detected as “poor”. Similarly, the ride between Gujarat University and Navrangpura railway crossing has 13% of the road stretch with poor quality, while in case of the stretch between Judges Bungalow and APMC Junction it is 11%.
“Most of the roads in the city are resurfaced and even repaired as per IRC standards and those laid by the Gujarat roads and building department. A lot of the roads had undergone patchwork. Especially in the west zone because of which there may be a few deformations. But the overall ride quality is as per standards,” said a senior AMC road and bridges department official. He also added that the app-based roughness index measurement usually does not distinguish between speed bumps or manholes with undulations on roads as part of roughness index.
Sudhir Khatri, 27, a restaurant owner in Prahladnagar says, “I usually take the Shivranjaini to Shreyas Crossing route to drop my daughter for her martial art classes. I find that the road had been dug recently and then patched haphazardly after the rains. Even my SUV’s suspensions gets rattled while driving on that stretch.” Kavi Sachdeva, 13, a school student from Vejalpur says, “I ride my bicycle for my tuition classes and I find the internal roads in residential areas to be poorly maintained. I sometimes get mild backaches after riding for 10 minutes.”