Alandi Road's Bus Lane Removal Was Supposed to Take 'A Few More Days.' That Was in July

Once a year, Alandi Road carries a crowd that has nothing to do with traffic engineering: seven to eight lakh Warkaris on foot, walking out from Alandi behind the Sant Dnyaneshwar Maharaj Palkhi at the start of the Ashadhi Wari. Police shut sections of it completely, divert fuel tankers, and in a bad monsoon year even the Wari route itself gets rerouted - in 2026, the district administration banned travel toward Alandi altogether for a stretch when all four bridges over the Indrayani river went under water. That's the scale this road is built to matter at, once a year.

The other 364 days, Alandi Road's problem was smaller and much more fixable: a dedicated BRT bus lane that ate up width the rest of the traffic needed, on one of the city's busiest corridors, long after everyone agreed it wasn't working as designed.

The decision, and the clock that came with it

PMC's general body actually voted on this on June 23, 2026, approving removal of the Alandi Road BRT corridor and directing officials to start immediately and finish within eight days. It was the last Rainbow BRT stretch left standing in the city - every other corridor had already been dismantled in previous years, and Alandi Road's had outlasted them mostly because of exactly this kind of delay.

Work actually began on July 3, 2026. In that first phase, crews cleared about 500 metres of corridor between Vishrantwadi Chowk and Parulekar School in Shantinagar - pulling out roughly 250 metres of concrete dividers on both sides, around 750 metres of iron safety railing, and a 35-by-4-metre BRT bus station. The reporting at the time was specific about what was left: a further three kilometres, from Vishrantwadi to Phulenagar, to be removed "in phases over the coming days."

That phrase - in the coming days - was written in early July. It's now October. Nothing in the public record since then confirms whether that remaining three kilometres is actually done, partly done, or sitting exactly where it was left. The eight-day deadline the general body itself set in June has, at minimum, been missed by months for the bulk of the corridor.

Why the missing lanes actually matter here

The stated reason for removing the BRT lane in the first place was simple: residents and local representatives had been saying for years that the dedicated lane narrowed the usable road just enough to turn ordinary traffic into a bottleneck. Removing it was meant to hand two more lanes back to general traffic on a stretch that genuinely needs them - a road that has to serve Vishrantwadi, Kalas, Phulenagar and the city's own industrial and residential growth toward Dighi and Alandi every single day, on top of carrying the occasional seven-lakh-person procession.

A half-finished lane removal is arguably worse than either finishing it or not starting at all - a road mid-demolition, with some stretches widened and others still choked by leftover dividers and railings, which is roughly what three months of silence on the remaining 2.5 kilometres suggests is happening right now.

The everyday version of the same problem

Strip away the scale of the Wari and Alandi Road is a very ordinary story: a daily commuter and business corridor, currently mid-construction, with lane capacity that's inconsistent block to block until whatever's left of this project actually finishes. That's exactly the kind of stretch where carpooling and shared trips matter most - not because of a once-a-year pilgrimage, but because every car removed from a half-widened road is one less vehicle competing for lanes that, as of today, still aren't all there yet.