The New Town authorities will undertake profile corrections of all roads in Action Areas I, II and III where road undulations will be levelled and a fresh layer of asphalt will be laid.
Profile correction is a road construction technique that improves a road’s vertical alignment and provides a better experience for the vehicles.
Across the city, hasty patchwork repairs — a go-to measure for civic authorities undertaking road repairs — have created wavy surfaces that offer bumpy and harrowing rides.
Driving down stretches of CR Avenue, EM Bypass, among others, is a bone-jarring experience where undulations on the road rock vehicles up and down even though there are no visible potholes or craters.
An engineer of the New Town Kolkata Development Authority (NKDA), which is going to undertake the “reprofiling of roads” in all the three action areas, said that it was decided at a recent meeting that this was the need of the hour given that the road network in New Town also has similar issues.
“We have had to bank on patchwork repairs for several long-term infrastructure works going on in New Town, including the setting up of the New Garia to Airport Metro line. We were doing patchwork repairs to save time and ensure that the dug-up stretches are repaired quickly,” the engineer said.
According to a senior NKDA official, the surface of several roads, including the Major Arterial Road (MAR), a 10.5km long corridor that connects New Town with the airport on one end and Salt Lake on the other, had turned wavy because of regular repairs of potholes and craters through patchwork as well as through contiguous bitumen mix
repairs.
“We have identified several stretches where this problem is acute and will start repairs from these stretches. Our engineers have already carried out a survey,” said the official.
According to him, the existing road surface will first be scraped away. Then a cold mix of bitumen will be laid to replace the road surface the official added.
This will ensure that the undulations along the road are levelled out.
In some places where road subsidence is commonly seen mastic asphalt will be used to resurface the roads.
Mastic asphalt though expensive lasts several years longer than regular bitumen roads for its water-repellent capabilities.
The tender process for the same has already been initiated soon and work is expected to start soon.
