Mumbai's Coastal Road project has a finish line now, at least on paper. December 2028.

The civic body has started piling and pile-cap work on the Dahisar-Bhayandar Link Road, the final stretch of a corridor meant to connect Versova all the way to Bhayandar. Launching-girder work, the stage where the actual bridge spans go up, begins in the second week of October.

To keep pace, the BMC has set up a casting yard in Bhayander dedicated to manufacturing precast concrete pieces for the bridge. An official from the civic body's Bridge department told the Free Press Journal that 60 piles, five pile caps, four piers, pier caps and nine bridge segments have already been completed, and that the yard has a temporary access bridge running.

Additional Municipal Commissioner Abhijit Bangar walked the site on Saturday. He looked at how the precast components are being made, checked quality control, and reportedly pushed officials to move faster on land acquisition, telling them to prioritise the parcels that matter most and to sync up with the Mira-Bhayandar Municipal Corporation on the ones that don't. He also wants stricter safety protocols and better barricading at the site, standard asks for a project of this scale but worth repeating given how long Mumbai's infrastructure timelines tend to stretch.

The numbers on this one are hard to ignore. The full coastal corridor runs about 60 km once you count interchanges and connector roads, split into seven packages labelled A through F plus the DBLR stretch itself. That last section alone is 5.135 km, a mix of elevated road, stretches on stilts cutting through mangrove patches, structures crossing the creek and salt-pan land, plus the connectors, interchanges and flyovers that tie it all together. Its centrepiece is a 3.83-km, 45-metre-wide elevated road, described as the final stretch that closes out the whole coastal road.

What it's meant to fix is the Versova-to-Bhayandar commute, currently a 90 to 120 minute slog depending on traffic. Once done, the BMC is projecting 15 to 20 minutes. That's the kind of number that sounds almost too good, and Mumbai commuters have heard promises like this before on other stretches of the coastal road. The whole package carries an estimated price tag of Rs 20,000 crore.

None of this happens overnight, and pile-cap work in September doesn't guarantee a 2028 ribbon-cutting. Land acquisition is still an open question in parts of the corridor, which is exactly why Bangar flagged it during his site visit. The October start on launching-girder work will be the next real marker of whether this timeline holds.