MURREE Hills is a popular tourist resort in summer. Nowadays a horde of tourists is visiting these hills. The number of vehicles entering the city reaches 5,000 on week days; it reaches 15,000 to 20,000 on weekends. The influx of such a large number of vehicles inflicts impairments on the smooth flow of traffic in the entire subdivision.

A traffic blockade, three-km-long queues of vehicles, is a routine matter, resulting in inconvenience not only for visitors but also for locals, as they experience unnecessary delays due to these problems.

There are a number of issues which the city and the district administration should consider for the undeterred flow of traffic.

First, traffic wardens have failed badly to control traffic, and so the Rawalpindi traffic police have arrived to put the things in order.

There are a lot of vulnerable zones in the city which require a careful planning of by the city administration. A wooden bridge established at Jhika Gali due to a landslide is one of the main throttle points.

Owing to the one-way nature of this wooden bridge, only one lane is allowed to pass. What happens is that if the traffic police stop the traffic from Kuldana Road, the traffic coming from Rawalpindi, as well as from Abbottabad, has to wait in long queues.

It takes usually three to four hours for vehicles at the end of the queue to get out of the queue.

On the other hand, if it stops at Jhika Gali, then all the commuters coming from the Expressway and Bhorbun suffer.

To remedy this, the wooden bridge, which has been there for the last two years, should be made two-way. Traffic signals should be installed in Jhika Gali to give a fair time to both sides of the traffic.

The second major area that witnesses traffic jams is Cart Road which starts from the Sunny Bank and ends at the city. This mostly happens due to large buses which ply on this road, and the long queues of vehicles to the CNG pump. Cart Road, a narrow one, cannot take such a huge load of buses and the CNG lane. To overcome this problem, bus-stand for large buses should be shifted somewhere else, and the CNG line should be curtailed to some agreeable fixed distance.

The third problem zone is upper Jhika Gali road which leads to The Mall. At this road the average queue length is three to four kilometres. Most of the hotels on this road do not have their own parking and thus their guests park vehicles on the road.

Furthermore, agents stop incoming vehicles just to bargain with them, as a result of which all the rear traffic stops. Hotels without parking lots should not be allowed to park their guest vehicles on upper Jhika Gali road, and agents interfering with traffic should be dealt with strictly according to the law.

In conclusion, the city administration should take immediate steps to remedy these problems so that visitors and locals can be facilitated, and in doing so any type of pressure from the business, hotel and political communities should be disregarded.

The Punjab chief minister is also requested to look into the matter, as he is also a frequent visitor of Murree. If he takes personal interest, he can put things in order.

ABDUL SALAM Murree