Toll Road Growing Pains

"Tollroads are much in the news in India - good news and bad news. The big bad news story is the first chaotic week of the new mostly 8-lane toll expressway southwest out of Delhi to Gurgaon, a developing edge city not far from Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport. 28km (17mi) long, the tollroad also becomes part of National Highway 8 between Delhi and Mumbai, formerly Bombay. Traffic volumes are already 150k/day in the corridor so the new road was built to four lanes each direction for most of its length."

"The road, formally the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway, abbreviated to Gurgaon Expressway is billed as India's first truly urban tollroad. One of the toll plazas at Km24 with 32 toll lanes is the largest in the country."

"The new road is a mix of upgraded surface arterial and new construction with a substantial elevated section, and new service roads in places. Construction cost was $250m (Rs1,000 crore, a crore being 10m, the Rupee Rs40=$). At purchasing power parity it would be several times."

"The promise of the expressway was that the journey from Delhi to Gurgaon would be reduced to a reliable 20 minutes compared to the 50 to 70 minutes drive over surface arterials."

"But news stories turned sour within a day as the mainline toll plaza at Km24 couldn't cope with the traffic and regularly developed backups described as 'several kilometers long'. Just the trip through the toll plaza in peak hours is said to be regularly 20 to 30 minutes. One reporter said stingingly it was the first expressway to be slower than the regular road."