3.6 UTILITY NETWORKS
Utility Networks in a city is synonymous to the blood streams in the human body. Malfunctioning of any specific stream may allow collapsing of the entire structure. Hence it is essential to ensure an efficient and conscious planning effort. Competent service providers are a key to good management of Utility Networks which is as critical as their planning.
Utility Networks are broadly classified into three distinct sub-sections, based on their nature.
3.6.1 Road Network and Traffic Movement
The topography of the town forms the base for the road network. Gelephu, unlike most other Bhutanese towns, possess a flat terrain, which allows various options of road layouts including a rectilinear grid pattern.
It is important to realize that most urban’ road patterns evolve and only a handful of them are planned before. In this process of evolution road networks are laid in order of nature and the shape of plots surrounding them. The Gelephu town core shows signs of a grid network, though not a perfect grid, but a skewed one. Today the road network in Gelephu functions effectively. The compactness of the town with most of the present development concentrated in and around the town core, and more than half of the population of the town living in these areas, together with a low vehicle ownership rate and the mixed landuse of the town, considerably reduces the vehicular movement. The Gelephu-Trongsa Highway forms the major spine of the town, with secondary roads branching at regular intervals.
Except for the town core area, if one analyses the road pattern near the match factory area, it is irregular in nature with meandering streets reaching doorsteps. The cross roads near Tsewang Goempa form a crucial junction in the town, with roads leading to Trongsa, Dattagari (India), Sarpang and the city core. There are a couple of parallel roads to Trongsa highway towards its east, which negotiate the internal traffic moving from the city core towards the north. Put together there are about fourteen kilometers of tarred road, existing within the town limits. A road development plan for Gelephu was prepared by the planning team of DUD&H (now DUDES) during 2001, and the road networks as per the proposed plan is under implementation to the east of the Gelephu-Trongsa Highway.
Ridged by rivers, roads and the international boundary Gelephu, has a compact urban form. It is essentially a pedestrian city. It is also the nodal focus of the national highway system connecting the larger urban settlements in central Bhutan with India. At present despite these contrasting traffic functions, serious conflict does not arise between pedestrian and vehicular movement. The existing traffic problems are amenable to correction by use of traffic management techniques supported by some minor construction works.
Over the next fifteen years, because of assumed growth in trade and commerce, along with higher personal incomes, it is envisioned that there will be a major increase in the number of commercial and private vehicles. Unless accommodation for these vehicles is planned, traffic congestion and hazards will grow rapidly as plan period progresses. At that time conflicts will arise between local traffic and through traffic; between traffic and pedestrians!
Most trips in Gelephu are made on foot and fifty percent of these take less than ten minutes. The close spatial relationship between various urban activities is clearly brought out by the survey. Inspite of the present dominance of pedestrian traffic in Gelephu, the lack of adequately defined and paved footpaths is a major concern. At the same time one cannot overlook the existing on-street and off-street footpaths in the town, an outcome of a deliberate effort of the local governing bodies. The footpaths along the roads of the town core and along the periphery of vegetable market and the football ground, connecting some of the institutional areas of the town, provide healthy clues for developing as well as an established footpath network in the future.
A total length of 920 meters of built footpaths exist in the town. With respect to the traffic movement pattern in the town, the existence of an organized system guiding the movement of traffic is very much evident in the town. This emerging framework is brought within a formal pattern in the Structure Plan. The Losal Lam and Jangchub Lam in the town core are the only existing one-way traffic movement corridors of the town. The traffic movement towards the east of the Gelephu-Trongsa highway is fragmented as a result of restricted traffic movement corridors created by the temporary Royal Bhutan Police and Royal Bhutan Army establishments.
