Hyderabad: The extended weekend, adding to visitors thronging to shopping malls, resulted in long traffic jams at Kukatpally, KPHB colony in the city and their surrounding areas. This began from Saturday afternoon and continued till late Sunday. Monday too being a public holiday in view of Gandhi Jayanthi, the same situation is expected to continue till Monday night.
K Durga Prasad, who works for a private firm, said that on Saturday evening around 5, he started from SR nagar in the city on his scooter, but navigating in the heavy flow of vehicles with bumper to bumper traffic till KPHB, took me more than two hours to cross the stretch.
“ Nobody has a clue about the jam. Despite the jam and slow movement of vehicles all around, there was mad rush everywhere on the roads,” he said.
Francis, a resident of Balanagar said that they have witnessed heavy vehicular flow even in the morning as early as 9am. “ The distance, which is usually covered in around 20 minutes, took over an hour this morning,” he said.
Traffic police were seen regulating the traffic at important junctions like Kukatpally Y Junction, KPHB and JNTU, but with the heavy volumes of traffic, their efforts did not yield much results.
Traffic officials opined that in view of the upcoming festival season, people seem to be utilising this weekend for festival shopping.
“ There is a huge crowd in the areas with malls. As there are a number of malls in close proximity, it has become an issue. Though these malls and showrooms have parking facilities, with heavy footfall, they are also filled beyond capacity and more vehicles coming to these places are lined up on the roads,” they said.
