Traffic snarls at Delhi’s brand-new flyover persist week after opening

A week after the Barapullah Phase-III flyover was thrown open with a promise of cutting the journey from Mayur Vihar to AIIMS in Delhi to just 15 minutes, commuters are spending more than an hour inching through traffic on the newly opened corridor. On Tuesday, traffic queues stretching over 2 km brought the 3.5-km stretch to a crawl, with commuters reporting waiting times of 70–100 minutes.

Videos shared by commuters showed vehicles packed bumper-to-bumper on the elevated road, with even ambulances caught in the snarl.

“I have been stuck on the flyover for the past 25 minutes in a traffic jam,” a commuter travelling from Noida towards New Delhi told The Hindu around 10.30 a.m. When contacted an hour later, the commuter said they were still stuck in the traffic and that it had taken more than 70 minutes to get off the flyover.

Another commuter described the stretch as “completely blocked”, saying traffic had remained stationary for nearly an hour and questioning the absence of traffic personnel on that particular stretch.

Meanwhile, the Public Works Department (PWD) on Tuesday placed jersey barriers at the merger point, a police officer said.

“The jersey barriers, which are concrete or plastic road dividers used to channel vehicles, are aimed at preventing vehicles from joining the existing corridor at an abrupt angle, allowing traffic to merge more smoothly and reducing the sudden slowing that has been contributing to the bottleneck,” the officer said.

The traffic police also deployed personnel at the merger point to manually regulate the flow, allowing traffic from each side to pass one stream at a time to ease the bottleneck, he added.

Redesign sought

In a letter dated October 1, the Delhi traffic police asked the PWD to modify the merger near Sundial Park. The letter was based on a joint inspection conducted by senior traffic police officers and PWD officials on September 30 to examine traffic movement and the geometry of the new flyover and its adjoining stretches.

The traffic police found that the new flyover joins the existing corridor through a relatively sharp, almost rectangular alignment rather than a gradual curve. This forces traffic to merge abruptly and creates a bottleneck at the junction.

The issue was already evident within days of the flyover opening. Barapullah Phase-III was opened to public traffic on September 29 and by the following evenings, queues had stretched up to 3.5 km.

“Travelling to Bhikaji Cama Place from Ghaziabad was a nightmare. Traffic was stuck on the new Barapullah flyover for more than 30 minutes in the morning,” a commuter said. Suggesting that congestion could be reduced by discouraging unnecessary traffic, the commuter said the stretch could even be made a toll road.

Traffic pattern

The traffic police have also written to Google seeking an update of the traffic pattern on the new road. South Delhi Deputy Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Sandeep Gupta said the company had sought seven to 10 days to incorporate sufficient traffic data.