Precast Construction of a 10km Long Viaduct: A Boon to Industry

Introduction

A major metro city of Southern India, Bangalore, has developed a major commercial hub called Electronic City in South-West of Bangalore. The area employs several hundreds of thousands of workers, majority being IT engineers. Electronic City is located 10 km from the main city and the road was highly congested with heavy traffic density. It used to take anywhere between half an hour to one hour to cover the distance of 10 km, before the Bangalore -Hosur Elevated Toll Expressway was constructed in the year 2010, see Fig.1. Since, most of the people traveling over the elevated expressway are elite class people, the owners decided to improve riding quality of the expressway by eliminating frequent expansion joints. A large spacing of 262 m between successive expansion joints was specified in the construction tender. In order to make the Electronic City junction (located at the end of elevated viaduct) signal free, it was decided to construct a complex interchange at this location. A few kilometers away, at Attibele and Chandapura junctions, regular elevated flyovers along the highway were provided as a part of the project. In order to take care of the cross traffic and pedestrians at different locations, several Vehicular Underpasses (VUPs) and Pedestrian Underpasses (PUPs) were provided. These were mainly constructed using Box Pushing technique, in order to avoid traffic disturbance during construction.