Pune: Weekend gridlocks have almost become a norm on the Mumbai-Pune expressway, and this Saturday was no exception. A surge of traffic once again brought the corridor to a crawl, with lumbering trailers and heavy vehicles choking the ghat stretch and turning peak-hour movement into a sluggish and exhausting ordeal. Officials said the traffic surge was partly due to election-related travel.This bottleneck comes barely days after a 32-hour ordeal caused by the overturning of a propylene tanker near the Adoshi tunnel in the Khandala ghat on Tuesday. The incident had triggered a massive traffic snarl, leaving thousands of commuters stranded as the congestion stretched up to 50km at its peak.
Travellers stuck in Saturday’s congestion reported significant delays, with travel time increasing by over an hour on several sections of the route. “Traffic stayed sluggish throughout the day, and people are still taking unusually long to reach their destinations. Even today (Saturday), vehicle movement was extremely slow. We had more than 25 cars travelling from Pune to Mumbai, and the trip ended up taking over five hours,” Pradeep Malpote, chief executive officer of KP Travels, said.Malpote blamed heavy vehicles for the expressway’s traffic gridlock. “Trucks and containers are responsible for most of the congestion. Many of them straddle multiple lanes, leaving hardly any space for smaller vehicles to move. This isn’t an isolated incident. The ghat section stays jammed late into the night,” he said.A highway police official attributed the continued gridlock to election-related travel and the sudden movement of heavy vehicles that had been halted earlier in the week following a tanker accident. “Due to the zilla parishad and panchayat samiti elections, many people are travelling between villages and cities. Heavy vehicles that were stalled for the past two to three days have also started moving at once,” the official said.Police officers said intermittent traffic blocks were being enforced to regulate vehicular movement. “Traffic is moving, but we are taking 10-minute blocks on the Mumbai side to ease Pune-bound congestion. Commuters should expect delays,” an officer said.The usual Mumbai-Pune travel time of around three hours saw a significant increase, with some motorists confirming to TOI that of taking more than an hour to reach their destinations. “Motorists should plan for at least two additional hours, depending on ghat congestion,” the officer said.Ashwin Trivedi, director of Pluto Travel India Private Limited, said the journey duration had noticeably increased. “A Pune-Mumbai trip normally takes 3 to 3-and-a-half hours, but today it stretched to 4 to four-an-a-half hours,” he said.Cab driver Sadiq Babu Sayyed reported long queues after the food mall stretch. “I left Mumbai for Pune at 11am and reached around 3.30pm-4pm. What should have ideally taken three-and-a-half hours took 4-5 hours. Traffic was slow from the food mall up to the Lonavla exit. Heavy vehicles were spread across all lanes, and breakdowns of buses and cars added to the chaos,” he said.Another cab driver, Mayur Bunage, said even the Pune-Panvel section was unusually slow. “We usually reach Panvel from Pune in about one-and-a-half hours, but today the entire journey took nearly four hours. I left Pune at 11am and was still short of Panvel at a time when I should have reached Mumbai airport,” he added.
