India plans to widen bridges across highways
New Delhi: The government is planning to widen all bridges running across highways to make them as wide as the highways themselves. Narrowing road bridges across highways are often blamed for vehicles crashing through parapets and crash barriers.
The move will escalate the cost of building new highway stretches with provision for uniform shoulders. The Union ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH) has issued a draft circular proposing that all highway routes maintain the width of surface highways at par with bridges and other structures along a stretch.
The ministry proposes to have uniform norms for shoulders (paved and earthen) in all types of highways including two-, four-, six- and eight-lane highways with the width of the shoulder being kept at 2.5 metres. At present, for 2-lane highways, the width of shoulders in open country and isolated built-up area in plain and rolling terrain is a lot narrower at 1.5 metres and 1.0 metre respectively.
This leaves little space to park broken-down vehicles and leads to congestion on highways and accidents. “It is highly desirable that the width of shoulder should be sufficient to protect pavement edge break, parking of errant/broken down vehicles, sufficient offset for placing of safety barrier etc.
To serve all the intended functions mentioned above in cost-effective manner, it has been decided that in two/four/six-laning of national highways, width of paved shoulder and earthen shoulder shall be a total of 2.5 metres (entire paved shoulder of 2.5 metres for roads in build-up areas and approaches to grade separated areas)," the MoRTH draft circular said. The circular further reads: “It is utmost important to have continuity & uniformity of roadway width (Carriageway
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