The Kurseong Municipal Area has approximately 5% roads, which is much less than any Medium Sized Town. With the rapid growth of Urbanization of the city of Siliguri and Darjeeling, the population of the Municipal Area is increasing day-by-day. In coming future, the percentage of present roads will not be able to cope up with this population pressure.
Road Structure
Roads are important to connect one place with another and depend upon its conditions & capacity of carrying load for providing better civic amenities to the public. At present we have about 82 KM length of Pucca road, 12 KM Black Top, 20 KM Concrete, 5 KM Macadam & 8 KM length of Kutcha road situated within Kurseong Municipality. The conditions of these roads are not up to the mark and need to be widened for easy flow of vehicles & should be strengthened immediately. The roads within Kurseong town are maintained by different agencies that are not within the control of this Municipality. As such the Municipality is at the mercy of these agencies regarding the maintenance of the roads.
The major city level roads in Kurseong Municipal Area are:
Hill Cart Road |
P.V. Road |
Dow Hill Road |
M.V. Road |
Hospital Road |
By-Pass Road |
The types of Roads existing in the Municipal area, according to their construction, are of 4 types presently:-
- Concrete
- Black top
- Water Bound Macadam
- Kutcha
Most of the roads are narrow and have little scope of widening. Kurseong Municipality still has a lot of open space. Nevertheless, the expansion is unplanned, thus leaving very little scope for any planned development of the town. With this unplanned urbanization, traffic congestion on roads especially in the station road area is a very common scenario.
The travel needs in the city are catered through Railways and Roads by a variety of modes of transport in the form of trains, buses run by Private operators, trackers and private vehicles such as cars and 2-wheelers. Improving socio-economic status, easy availability of vehicles, increase in population and lack of good public transport is resulting in steep growth of vehicles in the Municipal Area.
Due to this easy accessibility, the traffic demand of this area is increasing at a fast rate. In order to face this heavy demand the capacities of the major arterials roads have to be increased to ensure easy flow of traffic.
The commercialization led to an increase in parking demand along these roads, which in turn reduced the effective carriageway. Parking is a major and an emergent issue in Kurseong Municipal Area. The tendency in the Area is of commercialization along the main roads. Initially, the plots along these roads were residential in nature but with increasing land value and traffic on these roads, they were commercialized.
