United India Colony Third Main Road in Kodambakkam used to be a wide road — that was before the Integrated Stormwater Drain Project “transformed” it. When the road clears up — which usually translates to “when parked vehicles move out of the road” — it would be obvious the new stormwater drain runs close to the centre of the road. In practical, workaday terms, this means one vertical half of the road is out of bounds for moving traffic.

The new stormwater drain is supposed to function as a component of the carriageway, but does not. People perceive that space as being independent of the carriageway and park their wheels on it. On a section of the same road, where the new SWD does not have a run and is bitumen-topped from one end to the other, this behaviour is absent. It is treated entirely as a carriageway.

Bitumen-topping is certainly not advisable on a stormwater drain line. In the future, when the road goes through a relaying exercise, it should be carried out with a precision that would make the tarred portion and the vertical SWD patch as seamless as possible.

At present, the road cut undertaken along the stormwater drain to install silt-catch pits does not contribute to that impression.

Above all, through signboards and other forms of intervention, residents and road users should be educated on treating the SWD patch as integral to the carriageway and not as a sidewalk that can be usurped for parking. With Metro Rail work routing vehicular traffic through the interior roads, every square inch of a carriageway is hallowed ground and cannot be frittered away.