THE GOVERNMENT has scrambled the Public Works Department and police force to deal with the dangerous problem of increased traffic near and around the new Nicosia General Hospital as a result of the recent opening of IKEA and the new Mall of Cyprus.
Failure to plan for the opening of two huge commercial retail centres, despite warnings by various government departments, as reported by Ombudswoman Eliana Nicolaou, has led to traffic chaos and increased delays in getting ambulances to and from the hospital.
Employees of the Public Works Department were called without prior warning last Saturday and told to begin implementing temporary measures to deal with the crisis and provide ambulances with easier access.
Lanes were halved and an opening made on the Limassol-Larnaca highway near the Athalassas avenue traffic lights to allow ambulances to cross over in an emergency situation. Justice Minister Sophocles Sophocleous told reporters the new temporary measures cut travel time from the hospital to the traffic lights from 10-15 minutes down to just three minutes.
Communications Minister Maria Malaktou-Pamballi acknowledged there was a “very serious problem” and announced a number of short and medium-term measures to deal with it.
The Public Works Department (PWD) proposed to remove the partition in the road outside the hospital and make it an ambulance lane. The project will take five weeks to complete once the street lights have been removed, she said.
The PWD also suggested opening a road going under the Nicosia-Limassol highway, just for ambulances to get in and out of the hospital. Other measures include creating a new lane from the Strovolos roundabout to the highway which will take about four months; extending the left-turn lane towards the highway on Kalamon Avenue, as well as on Spyros Kyprianou Avenue, both of which will take eight weeks preparation; and, the building of a road from the BMW showroom to the highway through the Christos Stelios Ioannou Foundation road.
The proposed measures will relieve the area of congested traffic by making access to and from the highway much easier.
Longer term measures that could cost up to four million pounds include the building of a flyover connecting Stephanides roundabout with Stavrou Road in Strovolos.
Pamballi noted that the government had made an agreement with the company that built the mall and IKEA that they would take on any extra costs needed to upgrade the road network as a result of the opening of the two commercial centres. She highlighted that just because work was starting, this didn’t mean the government had given up its rights with regard the agreement with the company.
Regarding the delay in starting work on the traffic problem, she said: “Some changes should have been made before. But as you can see today there are plans that were made beforehand,” referring to the flyover, adding, “they did not happen yesterday or the day before”.
