Delhi: Failure Writ Large

After driving around a few days in Delhi the thought struck: it is not just the BRT, everything about Delhi’s road system is a failure.

For 20 years, flyovers are being built. But they haven’t solved anything.

Take the Outer Ring Road, which passes in front of Professor Dinesh Mohan’s IIT-D. (He designed the BRT.)

There are flyovers now in Nehru Place, Savitri, Chirag Dilli, Panchsheel and IIT Gate. But traffic crawls. There are crossings in between where there are big jams all the time. Note that the flyover at IIT was built 20 years ago. All the citizenry waited patiently in the chaos while these flyovers were being constructed.

If you travel on the Ring Road proper between AIIMS and Azadpur, you will drive over many, many flyovers – but remain with the feeling that this is a Third World Ring Road with severe design flaws.

People say that the Metro will solve everything. But I just travelled on the Mehrauli-Gurgaon road – and the road has been destroyed for the overhead railway project.

I saw the same on Rohtak Road.

So the work on the metro is not exactly unobtrusive and underground. In many sections the metro has taken over the road.

Yet I doubt whether the metro is designed to REPLACE cars and personal transport altogether, even in the long term.

So there is no alternative before the transport planner.

He will perforce have to design roads for motorists.

Cars may be a problem for him, but they are a SOLUTION for us, the citizenry, because without them our condition would be much worse.

The good news is that cars sales have grown at 17 per cent, and the entire automobile sector by about 10 per cent.

I hope the transport planners are reading this.

Delhi needs a seamless, grade-separated Ring Road, a similar airport road, plus many, many expressways in a ‘hub-and-spoke’ arrangement to connect the city to its surrounding towns. – like Rohtak, Meerut, Agra, Panipat and so on.

Then the surrounds will grow and the city will decongest. Cars and buses will move faster.

This will be a long term solution.