'Alaknanda Road carries three time more traffic than capacity'

A detailed traffic and mobility assessment conducted by an environmental protection organisation of a prominent South Delhi neighbourhood has "exposed" unprecedented congestion and lack of any official planning to resolve local problems including connectivity and parking pressure.
The study of Alaknanda area which is flanked by Greater Kailash II and Chittaranjan Park by Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) said that Alaknanda road carries three times more traffic than its original capacity and its on-street parking is 3.15 times more than the legal parking area.
"Piecemeal solutions at local level will not work. We need integrated street design and management, improved connectivity, and vehicle restraints.

"The time has come to move away from the current policy obsession of only fixing arterial roads for vehicle movement and speed and instead focus on better local network planning, more participatory urban planning to involve communities to find and implement local area solutions for mobility that work for all. This is urgently needed to solve the city-wide problem and to avert public health disaster in the making," said Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director, CSE.
CSE said that it has come of with first of its series on 'Know your Neighbourhood' and this report is titled "Move Free: Unlocking the traffic gridlock in our neighbourhoods".

Elaborating about the key findings of the study, CSE statement said that Alaknanda road carries three times more traffic than its original capacity while the actual on-street parking is 3.15 times more than the legal parking area.

It said that neighbourhoods have become both generator of traffic as well as victims of traffic congestion and the key stretch of the Alaknanda Road which was originally designed to carry about 1,000 vehicles an hour is carrying more than 2,500 vehicles an hour.
CSE's local area survey brought out unsustainable pressure of car ownership and while the inner spaces of the residential complex are already choc-a-block with parking, there is massive spill over of cars on the public road shrinking the carriageway.

The analysis said that the situation in Chittaranjan Park which is a plotted development is more challenging. The current parking demand in the area has already used up around 28 per cent of the geographical area of the colony, it said.