In recent years, traffic congestion, traffic accidents, and deterioration of the environment because of growing population, increasing urbanization, and increasing car ownership have become serious problems in the urban areas. Mumbai was ranked as the most traffic-congested city in the world for the second straight year, while Delhi was at fourth place as part of the Traffic Index 2018 published by TomTom, an Amsterdam-based company.
Traffic congestion means there are more vehicles trying to use a given road facility than it can handle- without exceeding acceptable levels of delay or inconvenience. Congestion and the associated slow urban mobility can have a huge adverse impact on both the quality of life and the economy.
- Indian cities are slow due to uncongested mobility and not due to mobility delays. They are slow at all times, even at night in the absence of traffic.
- A popular view is that urbanization leads to ever larger cities and increased rates of motorization. These two features eventually lead to a complete gridlock and congestion.
- Data on urban transportation in India is scarce. In the UK and the US, knowledge on urban mobility and congestion stems from surveys of household travel behaviour. However, such surveys are prohibitively expensive to carry out in India.
- The multi-purpose nature of urban transport also impacts urban mobility in India.
- The nature of urban transport, where roads are multipurpose public goods, used by various classes of motorised and non-motorised vehicles, as well as a wide variety of other users such as street-sellers, children playing and animals.
- the quality of the road network is bad which also leads to urban congestion.
- In Indian cities, there is a slow build-up of congestion that often persists until late into the evening. This is different from the familiar twin peak congestion patterns, due to morning and evening commutes as experienced in cities of USA.
- India’s unique travel patterns imply that country-level policies, and local-specific investments, are necessary, and that using our comprehensive data sources and methodology to study other countries individually may uncover distinctive patterns.
- Effective Traffic Policies like Street usage capacity, Area licensing System, Electronic Road Pricing, Quota for new vehicle system, Weekend car system etc must be implemented.
- Scaling up investments in travel infrastructure is the only way to improve uncongested mobility.
- Better Integrated Urban Planning: Currently, urban transport policies are regulated by city municipalities in the country. At the national level, the Government of India’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) mandated to transform urban areas, particularly urban transport
- Promotion and integration of Public Transport: The Working Group on Urban Transport for 12th Plan period recognizes the important of public transport. In India, metro rail transport is already in operation in cities like New Delhi and Bangalore. The same facilities are also underway in other major cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Jaipur and Kolkata.
- Intelligent signalization system: instead of using conventional old signalization we must go for automated signalization in the mega cities. Intersections are the major sources of the congestion and this system could relief a much amount of congestion
- Strict lane management: Different lanes for different types of vehicles should be marked on the roads and law i.e. financial penalty should be imposed to make the drivers maintain the lane discipline
- Supply and demand: Congestion can be reduced by either increasing road capacity (supply) or by reducing traffic (demand) revealed that road capacity can be increased in a number of ways such as adding more capacity over the whole of a route or at bottlenecks, creating new routes, and improvements for traffic management. Reduction of demand can include, parking restriction, park and ride, congestion pricing, road space rationing, incentives to use public transport and introduction of e-education, e-shopping and home-based working options will reduce the number of people travelling.
There is requirement of integrated urban transport policies to reduce the congestion on urban roads. Continuous vehicle purchasing due to high income in the mega cities also should be addressed and there should be birth of new rules and regulations for registering a new vehicle the major urban congested cities like Delhi, Mumbai etc State and city public transport undertaking need to be strengthened to attract the public to use the public transport. Introducing a rapid and efficient public transport and promoting it to a national level leads to some relief in the major congestion problems in the urban cities. In the mega cities there is a need of strict rules of parking and uniform charges of vehicles so that no one can park their vehicles on the busy roads.
