The vehicles were not only crawling at the toll plaza at the entrance of the elevated express highway but also on the road below the elevated tollway.
Vinutha V C, a software engineer who regularly travels to Electronic City, lamented that because of the implementation of the toll all the buses had decided to avoid the flyover.
"For the last one month, the buses used to take the flyover to reach Electronic City. However, they have decided to take the normal route after the toll plazas came up. I used to reach home in 15 minutes but it took me more than an hour today," she said.
Karthik M, a businessman, said that although he didn't have a problem with the toll, his only grudge was that they should have informed people before.
He felt that like the NICE road, which charges Rs 16, the flyover toll rate could also be reduced. Karthik had spent half an hour on Wednesday afternoon, the first day of the toll collection, at the toll gate and wasn't even given a receipt when he paid Rs 30 as toll.
Options
Jagadeesh Chandra, who rode on his bike, said that not buying the monthly pass gave him an option to take any route he preferred. "Although you cut down on time using the elevated highway, you actually end up spending more than 10 minutes at the toll plaza," he said.
He recalled that when BETL had conducted a mock test on toll collection a few days ago, there was a traffic jam on the flyover.
Srinivas, another regular commuter to Attibele, said he paid Rs 45 to travel to and fro on the elevated express highway. Srinivas stated that although he wanted to take a monthly pass, he was not aware about the procedure to buy it.
According to Brig (Retd) M R Deshpande, general manager, Bangalore Elevated Tollway Limited (BETL), the announcement of toll at the flyover was not a sudden decision. Since January, BETL had published the notification at least three times in all the leading newspapers, the last being on April 6. "We couldn't charge the toll earlier as we had not received the completion certificate. When we received the certificate on April 6, we immediately put it into force,” he said.
Despande pointed out that if people took monthly passes, the rush near the four lane toll plazas, on each side, would reduce. And, staff could permit at least 900 vehicles per hour, which at present was only 240 vehicles with cash transaction.
Interestingly, he pointed out that BETL in collaboration with Electronic City Association had set up sales point for monthly passes at a few IT and BT companies. However, the response was very poor. They again set up monthly pass kiosk in Infosys after a special request from them on Tuesday, but only 16 passes got sold.
DH News Service