On a busy night, traffic starts backing up in both directions, from A to B and B to A. There are three crossings on this road (marked with a white dot). None of these crossings have a light or a policeman directing traffic. Without anyone or anything to guide traffic people end up doing whatever it takes to exit (or enter) quickly, often blocking other traffic lanes. This quickly leads to a grid-lock situation.

Illustrated Map of approach into HKV. Red lines show traffic pile up. Lack of a line in a certain direction implies no traffic. maps.google.com

The map above shows the traffic situation on Saturday (22/6) at 8:50 PM. Red lines show where cars are standing and in which direction they want to move. You will notice how traffic, both in and out, has an empty street ahead of it. However, people turning into the main road block the other lanes, causing a grid lock.

I experienced this first hand and feel that theres a simple fix — adding traffic lights at the three intersections. The lights will make sure people don’t need to block other lanes to merge when turning and will also ensure that the main road has preference allowing cars to pick up pace. They should also be timed with the main light on Aurobindo Marg, making it such that once cars start moving they are quickly sent onto larger streets. The lights will make the travel time predictable and dependent on the distance, and not on the number of bad drivers in the area.

India and especially Delhi has come a long long way however there are a lot of simple things that we still don’t think about and take for granted. I hope that surfacing these issues and offering simple fixes gives our legislators the motivation to tackle these low hanging fruit.