Widening roads won’t cut jams in Delhi, reducing traffic will

The newly expanded 14-lane National Highway-24, one of the widest freeways in Delhi, has thrown up a new traffic management challenge.

While the drive between UP Gate and Sarai Kale Khan is a breeze, traffic crawls on the Ring Road running perpendicular to the highway.

At Sarai Kale Khan, situated next to a busy inter-state bus terminal, heavy pedestrian movement and the absence of crossover options have created a traffic bottleneck, HT had reportedlast week. On the other side, the Bhairon Marg intersection gets clogged by the sheer number of vehicles pouring out non-stop from the signal-free highway.

Now, belatedly, authorities are scrambling to find solutions. The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has written to the public works department to build a pedestrian bridge. The latter says it may also build a single-carriageway flyover adjacent to the existing one at Sarai Kale Khan.

Retrofitting pedestrian facilities as an afterthought is not new in our scheme of road-designing. But no new flyover comes with a guarantee that it will not shift the traffic jam to the next bottleneck. The southern sections of the Ring Road, the Outer Ring Road, and the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway experience snarls despite a string of flyovers.

For now, the NHAI insists that the number of passenger vehicles on the widened NH-24, which opened in May this year, is the same as before, and 30% of the commercial vehicles have gone to the Eastern Peripheral Expressway that bypasses Delhi. But it is too soon for a vehicle load evaluation. In the run-up to Commonwealth Games, 2010, the authorities had built two flyovers here with a promise to end road congestion. Within a few years, there were traffic hold-ups on top of the flyways. This was no exception. To decongest Delhi, agencies have over the years built more than 80 flyovers, overbridges and underpasses many of which remain gridlocked during peak hours.

It is a vicious cycle, says Amit Bhatt, director of Integrated Urban Transport at World Resources Institute, India. “If the volume of traffic is more than the capacity of a road, any progressive planner would try to reduce the volume through demand-side management. But authorities here choose to increase the capacity by taking up space from medians and pavements, creating end-to-end roads that get filled up by traffic soon,” he says.

It is indeed a Sisyphean task to catch up with what experts call “induced demand”. Widened roads and flyways attract new commuters who change their travel patterns, take more and longer trips because they can cover the distance quicker. Over time, according to Citylab, this puts more cars on the newly expanded road, increasing net vehicle miles travelled and gas emissions.

Researchers at Canada-based Victoria Transport Policy Institute concluded from several major studies that half of the increased roadway capacity is consumed by added traffic in about five years, and 80% of increased capacity is eventually consumed by induced traffic.

Following HT’s series “Unclog Delhi”, a committee of 18 stakeholder agencies formed by the Centre had in 2016 warned that “the automobile-centric planning with focus on road-widening and construction of more and more flyovers and underpasses have only promoted use of private vehicles, which meet only less than 20% of transport needs and should not be encouraged unless warranted by natural barriers, like rivers.”

Instead, the agencies agreed to make better use of the existing road space, give pedestrians and cyclists ample street space and ensure better traffic management. The committee prescribed a ‘carrot-and-stick’ policy where more investment goes into public transportation and private vehicle use is discouraged by way of road congestion tax — a fee charged from drivers entering highly congested zones — as enforced in Singapore, London and Stockholm. Early this year, Lieutenant-Governor Anil Baijal announced that the idea of levying congestion tax in 21 stretches was being explored.

It will take some political courage to restrict the movement of Delhi’s 9.8 million private vehicles. Before that, the city running short of over 5,500 public buses needs a major upgrade in public transportation. For now, though, at least eight new flyovers and elevated roads are under construction in Delhi. By the time they are ready, the city’s fleet size would have gone up manifold.

World over, this trap of induced demand has extracted high prices. San Francisco, Portland and Milwaukee in the United States and Seoul in South Korea even dismantled their urban highways. Yet, with 21% of Delhi’s geographical area already motorways, our authorities show little urgency for course corrections. One hopes it will not be too late when the impossibility of further expanding the city’s road infrastructure forces their hand.

First Published: Sep 24, 2018 02:56 IST