2 Lanes, 10 Metres, One River: What's Actually Happening With Pune's New Koregaon Park-Kalyani Nagar Bridge

The specs

Two lanes. Not four. That is the first thing to know about the new bridge the Pune Municipal Corporation is building across the Mula-Mutha river between Koregaon Park and Kalyani Nagar.

It sits parallel to the existing Sir Aga Khan Bridge, about 10 metres wide, and connects North Main Road in Koregaon Park directly to Kalyani Nagar on the other bank. PMC's own estimate for the job was Rs 28 crore. Civil work started in early-to-mid 2024, with the civic body projecting an 18-24 month build. Run that clock forward from when work actually began and the bridge should have been substantially ready somewhere between late 2025 and early 2026 - call it the original target window.

It is now October 2026. That window has closed without a public opening announcement, and the bridge does not show up in PMC's own recent round-up of bridges and flyovers scheduled to open through 2027 - Sadhu Vaswani Bridge, the Sus connectivity ramp, Karvenagar-Sun City, the Ghorpadi flyover. That absence could mean the Koregaon Park-Kalyani Nagar crossing has quietly wrapped up and simply isn't part of that particular list, or it could mean it has slipped past its original estimate the way a lot of mid-sized Pune civic projects do. Either way, the honest read as of today is: in progress, past its first deadline, with no confirmed handover date.

Why a four-lane bridge needed a second lane

The Aga Khan Bridge is one of the only direct links between Koregaon Park and Kalyani Nagar across the Mula-Mutha, which makes it a chokepoint by design, not by accident. Residents around N M Medical Chowk, right at the Koregaon Park end, routinely describe the stretch backing up between roughly 7 pm and 9 pm, which lines up with the evening commute out of the IT and hospitality corridor on the Kalyani Nagar side.

PMC has already been managing the bridge's capacity rather than just living with it: goods vehicles of one tonne and above are barred from crossing between 8 am and noon and again from 4 pm to 11 pm. That is effectively an admission that four lanes, shared between cars, two-wheelers, autos and trucks, can't absorb the load at peak hours without some vehicles being pushed off entirely. A second, parallel structure - even a narrower one - adds real crossing capacity on a river stretch where there's no spare width to widen the original bridge itself.

The project also includes widening a section of North Main Road near the existing bridge and the Bhairoba Nala pumping station, which matters because a second bridge deck is only as useful as the road feeding into it. Pune's recent bridge openings elsewhere - Keshav Nagar-Kharadi being one recent example - have shown the same pattern: a finished structure can sit underused for weeks if the approach road isn't ready alongside it.

What this means for a daily commute

None of this changes much for someone making a single Koregaon Park-Kalyani Nagar crossing today - the bridge isn't open yet, so the current four lanes are still what you're working with, restrictions included. But it's a useful reminder of how concentrated this particular commute is: a large number of people crossing the same narrow river gap at the same two hours every evening, shoulder to shoulder in separate cars.

That's exactly the pattern GoVia is built around. If you're one of the regulars doing this crossing at 7 or 8 pm, a carpool with a neighbour headed the same way across the same bridge means one less car adding to that queue, with both of you splitting the cost of the trip instead of each paying for a separate one. The same goes for errands that don't need a dedicated vehicle - a parcel going from a Koregaon Park address to a Kalyani Nagar one can usually ride along with someone already making that exact crossing, sharing the trip instead of sending a vehicle solely for it. It's a small adjustment, but on a stretch this congested, a few shared trips a day add up to noticeably less traffic pressing on that one bridge while Pune waits for the second one to open.