Delhi's headed for a traffic grid-lock!

Delhi’s arterial roads are breaching capacities before schedule. The City’s traffic has mostly grown to a point where new flyovers no longer help in clearing the congestion. Transport experts say Delhi is well on its way to becoming the next Bangkok, notorious around the world or nightmarish traffic jams. There are several ominous indicators across the city of intersections and flyovers breaching their designed carrying capacity a lot earlier than expected.

According to a 2008 RITES study on vehicular and traffic information around Delhi:

• Since 1972, traffic has increased by a whopping 21 times while road space has risen just 3.7 times.
  
• 44% of stretches are carrying more vehicles than they were designed for, 19% more are on the verge of exceeding capacity.
  
• Peak hour speed is 22kmph and the off peak speed is 26kmph.
  
• Ring-road which was designed for 75000 vehicles a day, has 160,000 vehicles and will hit the 400000 mark by 2011.
  

The reason behind the traffic mayhem is simple. The Capital’s vehicular population has simply exploded in the past decade. As per the economic survey, Delhi registered 564 private vehicles a day which has jumped to 1054 personal vehicles per day in 2006-07, an almost two fold increase and a CAGR of 6.42%. Private vehicles constitute 94% of the total vehicular strength. Delhi at present has 6 million vehicles, which is 10% of the country’s vehicular population. If the trend continues, it will have 250 lakh vehicles in the next 20 years. Much before that, the city will have ground to a complete halt.

Flyovers , Grade separators and signal free intersections are just a short and medium term solution for the traffic problems.

• One would probably need to reduce the load on roads and the Delhi Metro is doing quite a bit of that.
  
• Road widening is another critical point for reducing bottlenecks. This would require work in terms of removing permanent/semi permanent unauthorized buildings. It would also need to work at a “day to day” traffic discipline, specially with the Blue-line busses and large vehicles, which have shown scarce respect for traffic and traffic sense.
  
• One would also need to remove the slow moving vehicles from the road such as rickshaws, hand carts and in some cases auto rickshaws and busses as well etc.
  
• Civilian movement on roads would have to be prosecuted and which will need airways and foot over bridges, underpasses to handle foot traffic.
  
• The Singapore traffic model would also be a good one to follow with restricted entries to classes of vehicles on select roads. This would be marked by higher taxes and different colour numbering boards.
  
• SEZs, Office campuses and Residential complexes would have to be moved out of the city. This will require a comprehensive long term urban planning.
  
• Goods movement would have to restricted and non peak hours designated for goods movement.
  
• Parking lots for busses and other large vehicles need to be designated
  
• Finally, an awareness campaign targeted to the commuter and a strict and corruption free enforcement is needed.