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Solution To Delhi Traffic: 'flyover'

Posted by: Chris Steins
Thanks to: Chris Steins
2 September 2005 - 5:00am

The city is building short ramps to let cars bypass busy intersections. Traffic has improved, but for how long?

Take a megalopolis bursting with people, add to it a sudden boom in car ownership, and you have the sort of dilemma facing many city planners and engineers in the developing world these days. Delhi, however, has found a quick-fix of sorts: the flyover. Flyovers are block-length ramps without traffic signals that allow traffic to zip up, across, and over busy intersections. Twenty new flyovers have been built in the last five years and another 16 are under construction."

Full Story: Solution to Delhi traffic: 'flyover'
Source: The Christian Science Monitor, September 4, 2005
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Need for Integrated Long Term Approach in Planning

Submitted by Shivani Naik on Thu, 09/15/2005 - 12:03.

Constructing flyovers after every few miles over crowded and congested junctions with huge chunk of investment is not the solution to the increasing traffic problem of city. They can be just considered as interim elucidation of emerging traffic problem. The city is suffering because of planning and legislative failures on part of city planners, transport designers and off course the city managers alias-local government. Flyovers need to be built in harmony of the place, synchronizing the timely needs of the people including the pedestrians. Present scene of Delhi surely portrays impressive concrete structures as flyovers with energetic vehicles in the eventful commercial areas at macro level, but one should also zoom down at the narrow roads over which they are built indicating expansion needs and poor pedestrian traffic. Although Subways are another addition to these enormous flyovers, raising the question of its all time convenience.

S Naik
Architect-Urban Planner

Delhi is not alone

Submitted by mixup on Wed, 09/07/2005 - 12:57.

Among other things, these fly-overs are an Urban Designer's nightmare. For instance, Kolkata (Calcutta), did not wait too long to join the bandwagon; and in the process completely ruined its coveted skyline and streetscapes. And then there are the environmental costs. Absence of long-term planning, coordination of different arms of the bureaucracy, and ofcourse comprehensive vision, is basically creating an exoskeletal system while the organisms, that these cities are, are being crushed by them.

Blatant Shortsightedness

Submitted by injunplanna on Wed, 09/07/2005 - 11:10.

The City Government is being extremely shortsighted with their plans of the profusion of fly overs to aliviate the traffic woes of Delhi. Time and again tranportation professionals have promoted the idea of elevated thoroughfares (such as the Ring Road), but the city has turned a blind eye to it. Flyovers are becoming very detrimental to the city by isolating neighborhoods and severing pedestrian links. Places like Lajpat Nagar and South Extension are now divided by the Ring road with poor or no connectivity across the road since all the intersections are "flown-over" making crossing the road almost fatal.

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These practices are also inequitable since they force non-drivers to subsidize parking costs, reduce travel options for non-drivers, and reduce housing affordability.
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