Pune Experience of Traffic Gridlock
The Solution Lies in Moving Pedestrians Over Vehicles
Ameet Singh *
Pune, which till a few decades ago was known as the cycle city, is today fighting a losing battle with traffic congestions. Like most cities in India, the road network in this Maharashtrian city has expanded over the years. As a result, the city has forgotten to walk, run and to cycle. Whereas it used to take 15-20 minutes on an average to cycle from one point to another in the 80s and 90s, today it takes anything up to 35 minutes in a motorised vehicle. The main reason is faulty planning. Not a single road in Pune adheres to all IRC guidelines and as per Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) data, 53 per cent of Pune’s roads don’t have footpaths.
According to an estimate, the road length in Pune city limits is about 1,400-odd kms; if one were to consider the number of lanes and road widening exercises, the road length would be approximately 2,650 kms. If one takes 200 cars per km as optimum road carriage capacity. Pune’s total road capacity would be 5.3 lakh cars. The city already has more than 7.5 lakh cars. The total number of vehicles in the city is over 42 lakhs. It means that even if Pune’s total road capacity were to triple, the traffic would remain in a continuous gridlock. The story is not very different in most other big cities in India.
Widening Roads, Worsening Traffic
Over the years, city planners have put in more roads. They have also built over 40 bridges, underpasses and flyovers. Yet, the traffic problems keep on increasing. This is known as the Braess’s Paradox in economics -- if you build more roads, you get more traffic. The linear methods of thinking that we need to build more to accommodate more, does not hold true. In fact, the experience in many countries has established that the opposite occurs when you add more roads and the system collapses on itself.
Yet, despite this, the plans are to widen over 335 roads after felling more trees and building a much bigger city-wide grid. Rs 79,000 crore worth of more roads are being planned that include two ring roads and a highcapacity mass transit route (HCMTR). In some places, the road -- Hinjewadi to Sinhagad road for example -- has been widened to an absurd 96 meters. In places like Wagholi, the crossing area has been widened to over 90 metres. The traffic light is 90 metres from the stop line and is barely visible. The result is a chaotic pool of traffic trying to weave its way through bottlenecks.
On the other hand, if you constrict people’s movement, they discipline themselves to travel at an average speed. Congestion issues disappear. Many cities worldwide have experimented with several models to make this pattern hold. Clearly, the priority should be to move people over vehicles.
Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal Ltd (PMPML) or the local bus service has only 1,650 buses and ferries a million people per day. If the fleet were expanded 10 times its size – say through Public Private Partnerships -- in theory it would have the potential to ferry five to seven million people with relative air-conditioned ease and comfort. The population of Pune city is approximately that number, about seven million plus people.
“Pune’s total road capacity would be 5.3 lakh cars. The city already has more than 7.5 lakh cars. The total number of vehicles in the city is over 42 lakhs. It means that even if Pune’s total road capacity were to triple, the traffic would remain in a continuous gridlock”
The Pune metro project too will not be able to ferry as many people. According to Metro DPR data, the metro project, even if fully developed, across the currently envisaged 33 kms and three lines will not be able to ferry over six lakh people at full throughput; that is not even 10 per cent of the city’s population.
The Curious Case of Ganeshkhind Road
For a better understanding of the issue, let’s take the case of Ganeshkhind Road, where there is metro construction. Agricultural college, Pune University, Modern College, Vaikunthbhai Mehta Institute, Symbiosis – all these big institutes are along this road.
Three metro stations are planned on the 3.2-km length of Ganeshkhind road. These have been built keeping in view the current road width of 36 metres. Now, however, the road is being widened to 45 metres. For this, 93 old-growth trees have already been felled and more are to follow. This not only means that the number of road lanes are being increased, but also that our major defense against pollution is taken off. As the road widens, the traffic increases proportionally and so does the pollution as the longer cars spend in traffic they emit more noxious gases. For Ganeshkhind road, some estimates suggest this emission of gases to be 300 tonnes per day. With three planned metro stations, the number of lanes will increase three times over. Clearly, this road will become a gas chamber.
Further, this road is being built with only 2.5-metre wide footpaths. To understand how inadequate that would be, consider the maths. Say, at every 15-minute interval, four metro trains will pass through this arterial road – two each in both directions – with each train’s capacity of 1,000 passengers. Even if we consider that only a little over half would disembark and board the trains, that’s still a traffic of over 2,000 people every 15 minutes and almost 10,000 people transiting per hour. Will the 2.5-metre footpath suffice for this pedestrian load? How will they commute to and from the stations?
Then there is the rush of thousands of students from premier institutes walking along and crossing the road. Currently, for example, over 3,000 COEP Technological University students daily cross Ganeshkhind Road to get to their college, their hostels and back.
Ironically, despite Ganeshkhind Road having some of the greenest patches in Pune and a 3,500-acre biosphere a stone’s throw away, it records the highest air pollution in the city. It registers over an average of 200 AQLI readings for over 250 days of the year. Widening this road will only worsen the pollution.
“ Keeping in view the current road width of 36 metres. Now, however, the road is being widened to 45 metres. For this, 93 old-growth trees have already been felled and more are to follow. This not only means that the number of road lanes are being increased, but also that our major defense against pollution is taken off. As the road widens, the traffic increase proportionally and so does the pollution as the longer cars spend in traffic they emit more noxious gases.”
Ganeshkhind Road – Past to Present
Ganeshkhind road was once a beautiful tree-lined avenue with a huge fountain at one end and a town square at the other. In year 2000, it was planned to widen the road to 36 metres and remove the fountain. Several hundreds of old banyan trees were felled and a series of flyover projects were initiated. In 2007, a one-way flyover with three legs -- one to Pashan, one to Baner and one to Bremen Chowk -- was thrown open. Another flyover overriding FC Road Chowk was also built. FC road through JM Road was restructured into a one-way loop of traffic.
However, traffic now pooled up at the Shimla office or Shivajinagar and at COEP Chowk. So, a new flyover with grade separators and underpasses was conceived and it was fully commissioned in 2016-17. Traffic however refused to let up. The underpasses flood for 30 days a year, that is 10 per cent of the time.
In 2020, a special lockdown was called in July and the three-legged one-way flyover was razed to the ground. Citizens were told that building the flyover was a mistake and now the metro will be built. The metro project has been at the root cause of serious traffic jams throughout Pune, but people grin and bear it as they think it will solve the traffic problem in future. But it is like a cure looking for a disease. Not a single study has been released that tells the construction impact of the metro on Pune’s traffic. Over 3,000 trees have been felled for it. Though thousands have been transplanted, the success rate is almost zero.
Today, in 2024, Ganeshkhind metro is nowhere in sight, bridges have been razed and their replacement, a double-decker flyover, is nowhere to be seen. Further, footpaths have been destroyed and trees desecrated.
“The three reliefs that we got from the court are: tree census with geotagging, IRC guidelines to have statutory force and compulsory and a technical committee to look into the goings on of rebuilding Ganeshkhind Road”
People’s Action
Some of us chose not to take the situation lying down. We went to court where it was found that there was no application of mind on the concerned authorities’ part while planning all this. The court advised them to take IRC guidelines into account and appointed a committee to look into these issues. The three reliefs that we got from the court are: tree census with geotagging, IRC guidelines to have statutory force and compulsory and a technical committee to look into the goings on of rebuilding Ganeshkhind Road. However, yet another underpass has been announced along the same route to bypass University Circle. The matter is still in the court as this is being done and hopefully, things will change.
The fact is that without clean air, pure water and uncontaminated soil, all development is meaningless. For this, we should resolve to stop all tree felling, expand public transportation by at least ten times, redo our roads as per world-class IRC standards, include footpaths and cycle tracks along all roads and plant trees at 10-metre intervals on both sides of the roads as envisaged in the Maharashtra Tree Act 1975.
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