Every time Delhi hosts a gathering of world leaders, it must balance two competing demands: securing visiting dignitaries while keeping traffic moving. At the India AI Impact Summit in February, that balance was tested in ways that brought the cost of VVIP movement into sharp focus.
Misha Mittal, founder at Hikmah Group and former senior manager at Expo City Dubai, said Expo 2020 relied on free shuttle buses, Dubai Metro and parking management, while digital signboards provided real-time information to redirect traffic before bottlenecks formed. The expo drew 24 million visits over six months, with peak daily footfall exceeding 100,000, while the city continued to function normally, Mittal said. For Sara Hooker, co-founder and chief executive of Adaption Labs, it was more than an anecdote. Invited to a dinner hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, she returned to her hotel to change, got stuck in traffic for four hours and missed the dinner. For the BRICS summit, Delhi Police enforced a more dynamic approach than blanket restrictions. New York’s annual UN General Assembly is one example. Dubai offers a different lesson: managing demand before it reaches the road. “A moving security bubble is created ahead and behind. Venue selection also matters. Shah pointed to Yashobhoomi near Delhi airport, which has metro connectivity and was designed to host large events without drawing associated traffic into central Delhi.
Former British PM Rishi Sunak arrived a few minutes late to a session and joked that AI could do many things, but it “can’t yet fix Delhi’s traffic”. A senior IPS officer overseeing traffic said restrictions were imposed on a “need basis”, with specific junctions stopped only shortly before a delegation’s motorcade arrives. Dozens of heads of state converge on Manhattan, but the city focuses on warning commuters early and offering alternatives, said Parul Agarwala, a former India programme manager at UN-Habitat who also worked in New York City’s department of city planning. “Even when the US President is in London, traffic closures do not last 40 minutes,” he said. “The idea of building peripheral convention districts is precisely to avoid shutting down the city every time a summit is held,” Shah said.
