Most of the residents living across the Islamabad Expressway seem to have no interest in using the overhead bridges built at various points to facilitate them.
Despite warnings by the police and traffic instructions, pedestrians do not seem to take that extra effort to climb the bridges, and instead, just walk across the road. Pedestrian are generally reluctant to use the nearby overhead bridges like the old guy saying: “I’m in a hurry, I don’t care. I have to reach my office.”
An official of Islamabad Traffic Police said that they were doing their best to educate the road users and different sign boards have been installed to guide the road users. “I agree that most of the pedestrians prefer short-cut, avoid use of these overhead bridges and face road accidents”, he said. Several fatal and non-fatal road accidents have occurred on the Islamabad Expressway due to the negligence of pedestrians who jump at the road.
The official said that police would continue efforts to educate road users. He requested the people to use overhead bridges as they were erected for their safety.
The Expressway is one of the busiest roads of the city as most of the vehicles coming from Lahore use it to enter Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Muhammad Afzal, a car owner, talking to this agency, said the government has spent millions of rupees to facilitate people living across the Expressway for their safety, but most of the pedestrians are not using this facility, he regretted. Muhammad Shafi a public transport driver of route 21, said mostly people do not use the bridge for crossing the road and disturb the flow of traffic. Rehan Aslam, a government employee, said he always uses overhead bridges as these have been installed to facilitate the public.
Talking to this news agency, a spokesman for the Capital Development Authority (CDA) said a proposal was being considered to construct a six-foot high safety wall along the Islamabad Expressway to discourage the pedestrians from crossing the road, but due to financial crunch the plan had been dropped. To a question, he said overhead bridges will be installed at Zero Point Interchange for which a contract has been awarded to Heavy Mechanical Complex (HMC). The HMC would install the bridges soon, he added.
IHC vacation from 9th: The Islamabad High Court (IHC) will observe two-month summer vacations from July 9 to September 8, said an IHC notification. According to the notification, the court will reopen on September 10 for conducting regular hearing of the cases. When contacted, an IHC official said during the summer vacation, Chief Justice Iqbal Hameed-ur-Rehman has constituted few benches to hear bail matters,habeas corpus, detention matters and cases related to imminent threat of irreparable loss during vacations.
