The new grade separator at Kathipara Junction - Chennai

(Right click on the image and open in a new window or tab for a zoomed in version of the map)
The new clover shaped flyover at the Kathipara junction is sure to remain the pride of the city for a long time to come.

This might not be anything new to the developed world. But sure does cause a lot of excitement to an ardent chennaite like me and many others.

While the government and its departments were busy inaugurating the flyover the news papers were replete with verbose instructions on which road to take if you are going from one place to another.

So much was the confusion that it made my mother to request me to avoid the flyover whenever I go that side :-)

The truth is that you cannot avoid the flyover for certain route combinations and the structure is actually brilliant in its conception that way as it eliminates practically all dependencies and traffic signals in that complicated junction.

A few days later after the inauguration the Times of India did carry a superb elevation visual of the flyover but its principal drawbacks were again

• A slightly side-ish view of the elevation
• Verbose instructions for each segment.
  

I personally was longing to see a really top down view of the flyover supported by simple visual directions and legends that allows us to make our own visualizations for our source and target points on the flyover map.

That is why I spent 3 interesting hours in hand sketching this (using MS office drawing tools) image with just visual arrows and color coding of the same that allows anyone to figure out the route map for any source and target combination.

An interesting thing that I figured out while gazing at the topology was that although adjacent points are given a free left option on the ground (without using the flyover), if you still want to use the flyover desperately due to an initial excitement, you can surely do so by using a combination of the clover loops.

Anyways I just wanted to share my excitement about the new pride of Chennai through my blog!!!