Road less travelled

Being stuck in traffic is one of those unavoidable frustrations of urban living. Most cities,across the world,have to contend with intensified congestion,and are devising their own public policy solutions,but our cities are among the most spectacularly clogged.

While this growth spurt in traffic may be inevitable,it’s up to government to organise and price mass transit,and to innovate with transportation planning. It needs to build the infrastructure to accommodate our needs,and manage traffic patterns optimally. In late 2007,the Centre had committed to a Rs 16,600 crore plan to decongest our rapidly growing towns,including Hyderabad,Amritsar,Pune,Nagpur,Chennai,Bhopal,Coimbatore,etc. This entailed making design interventions — by creating ring roads to loop around the city,building roads that allowed traffic to fly over or pass under existing roads,tunnels and bypasses to divert part of the rapid flow of traffic,and increasing the number of lanes. However,most of these plans are still to materialise. The seventh phase of the national highways development programme seems to be stuck on most fronts,and will struggle to meet the December 2014 deadline for its projects. Feasibility studies are still being undertaken in many of these plans,others have stalled at the bidding stage. Either way,this delay is costing our cities.

Obviously,different metropolitan areas have their own reasons for congestion — in some cities it’s density of settlement in confined areas,in others it’s sprawl and employment decentralisation. Many other cities have experimented with their own solutions to ration road space,like London’s congestion charges,which are then pumped into the public transport system. Most Indian towns have grown organically,and lie spreadeagled across hundreds of kilometres,but have not been redesigned to cope with the new crush of cars,trucks and cycles that accompany growth. What they need is better planning and engineering,alternatives to the major thoroughfares,a network of roads that loop around and let the traffic whiz around quicker.