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.

A system in rot

In one of my earliest blog posts in September 2008, i had debated the state of Indian roads with the Mint editor Raju Narisetti.
http://newspaper-posts.blogspot.com/2008/08/of-infrsatructure-and-capital.html
http://newspaper-posts.blogspot.com/2008/09/of-infrastructure-and-capital.html

The debate on accountability for the bad state of infrastructure has been re kindled by the CAG report which was reported by TOI:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Delhi/55_of_roads_okayed_by_MCD_substandard_CAG/articleshow/4203120.cms
The report brings forth the following points

1. MCD accepts substandard road work from contractors insteda of opting for minimum quality standards. Third party checks on 20 roads built between 2003 and 2008 reported 55% of the roads below standard.
   42 roads have been damaged during the warranty period and there have been no repairs made on to them. This was while the warranty covered all costs of repairs.


2. 5 newly built roads made at a cost of Rs.3.18 crores were accpeted by the MCD where as third party checks by the CAG have found them to be substandard.


3. Of 304 RWAs (resident welfare associations) surveyed 77% have reported bad roads in their colonies and 71% have said that the roads in their colonies have not been repaired even once in the last 5 years.


4. Of the total allocation of monies for road development, MCD has routinely diverted the money to purchase of vehicles, computers, hiring of vehicles and office work constructions.


5. Contractors delay the road work routinely, and though they should be fined for it, none of they are ever penalised courtesy MCD.


6. On an average 87% of the total project contractual work amounts are duly paid up to the contractors, with out any completion of work.


7. Monies collected from other agencies for road development lies sorely under utilised.


8. MCD has been commissioning quality checks without mandatory quality checks 53% of the times.


9. A third of MCD assets such as drainage, sewage, roads and subways are in a state of neglect.
   

These are just about gaping wide craters in the system, sucking up the taxpayers money and distributing it to a few pockets in the MCD and the Government machinery. While fraudsters and scamsters are tried, penalised and punished, the MCD - Government nexus which is probably a shade worse in fraud, scmas and misuse of public money go about becoming more powerful and more irresponsible and more corrupt in their ways. One would have to give the kudos to CAG to bring such facts on the table. But one needs a more wilful, accountable and "aware" governance to fight se evils of the system.