The Delhi Traffic Police has written two letters to the Public Works Department (PWD) seeking a list of major design changes on the newly opened Barapullah Phase-III corridor, which has come under growing criticism after triggering severe traffic jams across south and southeast Delhi.
Traffic Police seeks changes to Barapullah merger point
Instead of improving traffic flow, the new elevated corridor quickly became gridlocked, with the congestion cascading across south and southeast Delhi. At the junction where the new corridor met the existing flyover, they found that the merging point had a sharp/rectangular geometry instead of a smooth curvature. Phase-III has three lanes, while another three lanes from the Sundial side, carrying traffic from Sarai Kale Khan and Ring Road, merge at the same location. Three more lanes from the Ashram/DND side feed towards the existing Barapullah corridor, which has only two lanes at the relevant stretch.
The interventions by Delhi Traffic Police come less than a week after Barapullah Phase-III opened to traffic on September 29. As the chaos caused by the new corridor spread, Delhi Traffic Police conducted a drone survey of the new stretch on October 1 and found a set of two three-lane roads were feeding into a single three-lane corridor at several points. In a letter dated October 1, the deputy commissioner of police (southern range) flagged the issues to the executive engineer of PWD’s flyover project division F-21 after a joint inspection by Traffic Police and PWD officials.
Because of the exceptionally high traffic volumes on the newly opened corridor – a crucial stretch connecting Mayur Vihar to south Delhi, it said geometric and traffic-flow issues at the merger were contributing to significant congestion, particularly.
The Traffic Police also flagged what it called a “substantial mismatch” in lane capacity. The impact was particularly severe on Thursday evening, when the eight-km drive from Safdarjung Hospital to Sarai Kale Khan took more than an hour.
