NEW DELHI: As Delhi grapples with congested roads and the increasing volume of traffic, its PWD minister has an interesting take on the problem. Satyendar Jain says that the city has sufficient road length required to accommodate the 82 lakh registered vehicles, but poor road engineering has let the traffic managers down.

“Lane driving is an extremely important concept for smooth traffic flow, but the road width in Delhi just does not allow for safe lane driving,” says Jain. He points out that the roads in the capital have been designed with six, four or three lanes, which often tempt users into reckless driving. He says rather than augmenting road length, it is more important to redesign the existing roads.

He must be right, for drivers often encounter poorly planned road infrastructure that tests their nerves. East Delhi’s Mother Dairy Road is an example. Traffic jams are a daily occurrence between Patparganj and Laxmi Nagar here because the central verge on the road ends a few metres in front of the mouth of a flyover with five roads – and no signage or a traffic signal to prepare drivers for the chaos.

A similarly designed median in Greater Kailash-II in south Delhi has forced residents to approach the court. The PWD had created a central verge on the four-lane street there, pleading that this was necessary in view of the increased traffic on the stretch. However, the residents found it only aggravated the traffic jams, not only because the verge narrowed the available road space but also because no cuts were provided in the median to facilitate turns.

Anumita Roychowdhury, who heads the Centre for Science and Environment’s Clean Air programme, says that Delhi’s road infrastructure revolves around private vehicles and not pedestrians or public transport. “While the government’s focus is on creating arterial roads, elevated corridors and flyovers, it pays scant attention to footpaths, convenient bus stops, pedestrian crossings, and so on. As such, by making infrastructure better for personal vehicles, the government is discouraging walking and use of public transport,” she says. Why isn’t the government showing an interest in improving connectivity between arterial roads to allow faster dispersal of traffic, she wonders.

It is common to see Delhi’s roads changing from two lanes to three lanes to four lanes and back to two, perplexing drivers and leading to jams. The Press Enclave Road in south Delhi is a case in point. For a few hundred metres towards the BRT corridor, it is a uniform stretch. But past the red light at Saket, the lanes swing in and out, depending on the encroachments. At one point, the driver negotiates past just one and a half lanes.

It is easy to understand why the police have problems managing traffic on such spans. Special CP (traffic) Muktesh Chander asks, “How does one ensure lane driving when the lanes are not properly marked or when the road markings end abruptly at a pillar or tree?” He says that if drivers are to be expected to follow road rules, they must be provided with good road facilities too.

The Unified Traffic and Transportation Infrastructure (Planning & Engineering) Centre, the nodal body for traffic planning in the National Capital Region, has specific guidelines about road construction, including desirable aspects such as drainage and pedestrian and cycling tracks. But frequently, footpaths, where they exist, turn into parking lots or are encroached upon, while the roads themselves have no consistency in terms of lanes, width or signage.