MUMBAI, July 29 -- "Traffic movement is slow at Vakola Bridge northbound due to pothole," tweeted the Mumbai Traffic Police on Monday. The problem isn't the typo in the tweet, but the refusal of the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) to acknowledge that the flyover is a minefield of craters. The traffic police have been tweeting on the condition of Mumbai's streets for a while now, aiding commuters with timely updates throughout the day. But the Vakola flyover has been featuring on their social media handle at least once a day, in the last three days. Running along the Western Express Highway, the flyover is a critical link to the domestic airport from South Mumbai. Two months into the monsoon and it's already pockmarked, forcing traffic to back up for several kilometres. This has thrown Chandraprakash Lohar's schedule out of whack. A stickler for punctuality, Lohar is now consistently late picking up his children from their workplace. Although he commutes from Kandivali to Bandra on his way back from work in the afternoon, he just can't seem to get there on time. The culprit, he insists, is the Vakola bridge, whose potholed surface is holding up traffic. "The Vakola bridge adds an hour to an hour and a half to my commute every day," says Lohar. "The journey takes me two to two and a half hours, and I'm almost always late to pick up my kids. At peak time, the journey would easily take me over three hours." Lohar says the south-bound stretch of the flyover was repaired before the monsoon, and yet it couldn't withstand even the first spell of heavy rain. Now, it's a cratered mess. "The bridge has been stripped of its top layer, leaving deep holes in its surface." Another commuter, Pratik Salgaonkar, says the Vakola flyover has added two hours to his daily commute. "I leave home at 9am from Marve, heading to Tardeo. But it is the 7-8-km stretch from NESCO at Goregaon, till the Vakola flyover that's the worst. It holds me up by an hour or more, which makes my morning commute two and a half hours long, and my evening commute three hours long." The potholes hold up motorists even when driving against the traffic flow, says Mumbai North Central District Forum (MNCDF) co-convener Reshma Doshi, who drives from Bandra to Marol in the morning and returns in the evening. "It's just terrible. The north-bound side recently developed more potholes." The traffic police say that when they notice potholes on any street, they immediately inform authorities like the BMC, MMRDA or MSRDC. "Our officers pinpoint the exact location of the potholes. These are repaired but they resurface within a day or two," said Anil Kumbhare, joint commissioner of police (traffic). An official from MSRDC said, "We have been consistently filling the potholes with coal mix, but due to continuous rain, we get barely a few hours to do it. We will continue to fill them as long as is needed."...