City residents experienced a harrowing time with traffic jams that tested their patience on Sunday and Monday.
The traffic jam spread from Kukatpally to Madhapur, thanks to the Lulu Group, a UAE-based retailer, that unveiled its first shopping mall in Hyderabad recently. It drew an overwhelming response from the city’s residents but the surge in footfall not only created a congestion nightmare within the mall but also spilled onto the surrounding roads.
Five years ago, in 2018, Hyderabad encountered a similar situation when about 40,000 people stormed Swedish furniture-maker IKEA’s debut store in India.
The predicament gets worsened on weekends, with joyrides turning into nightmares for many commuters.
Pavan Kumar Reddy, a software engineer, shared his ordeal of attempting to reach Cinepolis, inside the mall, for a movie scheduled at 7:40 p.m. Residing in Gopanpally, he started from his residence at 5 p.m. and reached the Forum Mall flyover at about 5:30 p.m.., from there it took Pavan two hours to reach the mall, which is just 1.7 km away.
“After a lot of hurdles, when I reached the mall, the police barricaded the entrance and were not letting us inside. With heavy traffic and no option for me to even have a conversation with the police, I had to leave,” he said.
Another commuter, Sharath said that he noticed many people parking their vehicles on the flyover to visit the mall. This makes it even more inconvenient for commuters to drive past the jam, he said.
Although the mall’s official website claims to offer parking for 1,000 cars and 900 bikes, experiences shared by visitors concludes that this space is insufficient during weekends.
Traffic volunteer Bellam Srinivas highlighted the exceeding capacity of visitors at the mall. He suggested easing traffic on main roads from KPHB metro station to JNTU metro station could alleviate the situation. Srinivas urged citizens to recognise the congestion issue, proposing a temporary avoidance of the mall for a month to mitigate the problem. He emphasised that the mall is a permanent fixture in the city.
