Sabotaging the Mahinda Chintana

L. Jayasooriya, Chartered Engineer

Continued from Saturday page 21

Now let me explain how a four lane expressway gets shut down. The difference between motorways and dual carriageways is that the former is designed to maintain a uniform speed of - say 120 kph or more but the latter is an ordinary road with variable speed like the four lane dual carriageway of Galle Road into which traffic can enter from side roads starting from rest.

In the case of a motorway you cannot come up to the motorway, stop, look right, look left, look right again and then get into the motorway from rest. There will be no provision for you to do that in any motorway but if you enter the motorway in that manner the vehicle behind you will crash on to you causing a multiple crash involving twenty or thirty or more vehicles.

Motorway

You have to enter the motorway at the design speed of the motorway which will be at least 110 kph. To enable you to do this a lane adjacent to the motorway has been provided along which you accelerate to reach the motorway speed and merge into a gap.

You got to enter the motorway within the length of the acceleration lane which may be anything from 800 metres to one kilometre but very often they are much shorter than that. If you miss then you will be driven on to the hard shoulder meant for parking a disabled vehicle or for the use of police, fire and ambulance.

In a six lane motorway the drivers on the outer lane can see far ahead of them other vehicles trying to merge with the motorway traffic. They then look behind the mirror, signal and change to the middle lane making it easy for those who want to enter the motorway because merging into a gap needs correct judgement and quick reflexes. It is a moment of tension for everybody except a fool of whom there are so many in Sri Lanka.

The situation in a four lane motorway is very different. In a crowded four lane motorway (two lanes on either side of the median) there is no space in the inner lane for the driver in the outer lane to move into and so he slows down in apprehension as he approaches the entry point.

Ripple

This slowing down has a ripple effect extending perhaps a kilometre or two behind him. As the drivers on the outer lane slow down those entering the motorway get bolder and at a certain stage just cut in. When that happens all the vehicles behind stop and this will extend all the way back for several kilometres.

That is when the motorway shuts down. If that happens when you are on the way to catch a flight you should then use your hand phone and ask them to delay the flight for at least two hours or so.

Some years ago when I exposed this, somebody, I am sure under a false name and most probably an RDA man wrote to the papers attempting to ridicule me by saying that the solution to the problem is to provide a wide entry point.

To my surprise many professional men asked me what I got to say to that. What that man wanted the reader to understand is that when a motorway is running full, meaning running at maximum capacity with maximum permissible speed and a safe separation from the vehicle in front the maximum capacity of the motorway could be increased beyond maximum capacity with a gimmick like this.

There can be only one vehicle entering a gap. More vehicles could enter if the gap is very large which is not the case in a motorway running full. Hence only one entry point is made available.

When the motorway fails the brains of the RDA will get activated and will then want to expand the four lane motorway to a six lane motorway. The process involved is as follows: The boundary of the motorway property may be a cutting into a hill or it may be a fence whether in flat ground or in an embankment.

Let us take the case of a motorway in a section which is on an embankment. The first thing to do is to strip the entire hard shoulder and rebuild it to motorway traffic lane standards. A new hard shoulder will have to be built in the area of the slope of the grassed embankment.

The top soil in this area will have to be removed and carted away. Even if this is not done for the rest of the embankment earth will have brought in and added to the existing embankment which will overflow to the existing ditch and the fence.

The new soil in the area of the new hard shoulder will have to be free of organic matter even if the rest is not. The soil under the new hard shoulder will have to be compacted and the new embankment grassed.

A new ditch will have to be excavated and the fence will have to be moved out. Do this on the other side as well disrupting traffic for many years but to do all that new land has to be acquired.

Distinguish

I will now tell the reader how the rest of the world other than the RDA plans motorways. They distinguish between motorways running through the countryside as rural motorways and those running through the cities as urban motorways where the specifications are different.

Today in planning throughout the world a central reservation of 10 to 20 metres or more is made for rural motorways and at least half that amount for urban motorways. Having decided on the maximum number of lanes the motorway will have in the distant future land is acquired to suit and the boundary fence is put up.

Inside the fence is the ditch and further in is the embankment terminating at the hard shoulder. The shoulder and two lanes are built on either side leaving a huge area at the central reservation.

When the time comes to increase the number of lanes from four to six just add two lanes from the central reservation. If it is decided to increase the motorway to eight lanes it means just adding two more lanes from the central reservation.

I understand that the Kurundugahahethekma to Matara section of the Southern expressway is going to be built as a four lane motorway for its final and maximum capacity and it has not been planned by the RDA as an expandable motorway the way I just described.

So according to the RDA this motorway will never need any expanding in the future. The day when the four lane motorway has to be expanded to six, we will have to spend time and money almost as required for a new motorway taking many years to complete while at the same time disrupting the normal traffic.

We are a small and poor country. We have no money to waste. In any case will a rich country waste money at all let alone on such a massive scale like this? With the opening of this four lane motorway one could expect a rapid growth in the number of vehicles in the Southern Province necessitating a six lane motorway in the near future of say 25 years and an eight lane motorway in a further say 50 years time and each time the RDA will be destroying what we already have to add two extra lanes.

Future generations will have to pay for what the RDA has done and is now doing. I have mentioned all this in many articles in the newspapers and nobody has cared.

Please remember that every time we destroy it means new contracts and every time we rebuild what has been destroyed it also means new contracts. All that will be in addition to the two new lanes that we wanted in the first place. There will be a carnival of contracts with all its implications and this poor country will have to foot the bill that a rich country like America will never do.

Shoulder

The original plan of the RDA was to build a two lane motorway first meaning two lanes of opposing traffic side by side each with a hard shoulder and then a four lane motorway later. These were going to be two lanes side by side opposing each other without a central reservation.

In an article titled ‘Carnage on the Southern Expressway’ in The Island of November 25, 2003 I exposed in detail the stupidity of the plan and the danger that it posed to the users in trying to overtake vehicles travelling at speeds around 120 km/h while the speed in the opposing lane is of the same magnitude.

Guarantee

The Chairman of the RDA without giving his name replied to me in The Island on January 9, 2004 saying that a speed limit of 80 km/h will be imposed and strictly enforced. Does it mean that the Chairman of the RDA is going to enforce the speed limit? Can he give the citizens a guarantee on that?

This is what I call a stupid answer to a dangerous idea of an immature mind but he defends his stand by making a statement that is clearly not applicable here saying “The two-lane motor traffic highway concept is widely used internationally to avoid excessive costs and uneconomical investment during the first stage”.

There is nothing wrong in a two-lane concept provided, there is a median separating the two lanes of opposing traffic and traffic cannot cross over to the opposing lane but in this case traffic will cross over to the opposing lane at 120 km/h to have a head-on collision with a vehicle in the opposite direction also travelling at 120 km/h resulting in a 240 km/h collision and many vehicles will be crashing on to the wreckage. For powerful heavy vehicles the resultant crash will be over 300kph.

There will be other vehicles overtaking on the hard shoulder on the left which is sloped to drain away the rain water while in areas of super-elevated road, it mounts to banking in the opposite direction for high speed vehicles.

Those vehicles will just disappear from the radar screen. The Chairman RDA winds up by saying “It may be sad that L. Jayasooriya casts a spell of doom possibly living in an imaginary world of total pessimistic approach etc.”

Finally it was the Asian Development Bank who saw the danger and stopped this stupid idea of the RDA. The RDA has no excuse to blame the funding as the reason for their stupid idea because they have defended their stupidity with what they have stated above.

Now the RDA is constructing a four-lane non-expandable motorway which will need destruction and rebuilding whenever they want to add two extra lanes as I have described before.

Let me now come up with another piece of a jewel from the RDA. I have not seen this but have only heard about it. I understand that in the hilly section from Avissawella to Karawanella where there are sharp bends no banking has been provided presumably because when the RDA applied their ‘banking formula’ using the very low statutory speed limit they found that no banking was required. Any Gramasevaka Niladari would have provided some sort of banking. It would be useful to find out whether the late Sripathisuriyaaratchi went off the road in such a bend.

Ring

The RDA is still talking about a ring road to bypass the centre of the city. Roundabouts and ring roads are British concepts that have proved to be failures, examples of which are the North and South Circular roads in London. I do not know about the state of the ring road around Paris today. The last time I drove on it to avoid Paris was 40 years ago.

I now come to the repair of roads. Whenever a pot-hole appears on the road it is filled with stones and hot tar is superficially sprayed on it with a topping of sand. How long does that last? If there are too many pot- holes the entire road is stripped and metal (small stones) is laid on it and compacted.

Hot tar is sprayed over it followed by a sprinkling of sand whereas laying a carpet of asphalt (bitumen concrete) would be very efficient, long lasting and much cheaper in the end but there will be no endless contracts.

The RDA after having destroyed the roads of this country from 1948 till today 2008 which is 60 long years, at long last realised that they could get into trouble now that the President is personally interested in roads.

So they signed an MoU with the National Highways Authority (NHA) of India for technical and scientific cooperation in highway construction, maintenance and management of roads which will facilitate the exchange of expertise, developments in research and knowledge.

Based on the little I have exposed about the RDA it is a downright insult to the NHA of India to even suggest that it could learn anything from the RDA.

The Financial Review of The Island of May 3, 2008 says and I quote “India can learn from Sri Lanka, at least from the mistakes we have made”, said M.B.S. Fernando, Chairman, RDA. India has never destroyed her road system the way the RDA has done and to suggest that India can learn from the mistakes the RDA has done is another insult to the NHA of India.

The RDA knowing that their traitorous activities will soon be exposed decided to involve Indian engineers to deflect the blame. In plain language all what this means is that the RDA has pleaded with the NHA of India to save them from absolute disaster and I hope that in the interest of the country the President will understand why this move was made by the RDA after 60 years of destruction.

Suggestion

The best suggestion that I can make and I am sure that the readers will agree with me, would be for the Government to hand over the controls of road development to the Indian team in Sri Lanka on a contract basis and put young engineers fresh from the university to work under them.

These young engineers have not been infected with the do-nothing-no-responsibility-virus. All senior staff of the RDA responsible for this economic disaster should be relieved of their jobs and sent elsewhere where they can no longer sabotage the country. If the readers were to agree then they should convey the idea to the President.

(Concluded)

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