Every evening at 5.30, autorickshaw driver Satish races from Dhaula Kuan to the Gurgaon-Delhi border to make it through before the crossing becomes a nightmare. He knows that even a slight delay means getting stuck in one of the city’s most painful stretches. “Yeh toh sapna hai ki main ek ride ke baad doosri bhi le sakun (It’s unimaginable that I can drive there and then drive back)!” Satish exclaimed. “After 6pm, I refuse customers because everyone —airport passengers, Dwarka commuters, Gurgaon office-goers — is funnelled through this one road.”
The route key to reaching Gurgaon
Getting stuck between Dhaula Kuan and the Delhi-Haryana border is so exasperating that Siddhartha, 39, actually left Gurgaon and shifted to Noida. His wife’s daily commute stretched to five exhausting hours, and his own work, which required constant travel across NCR, was just as frustrating. “It isn’t just peak-hour jams anymore — it’s chaos all day,” said Siddhartha.
Leaving home early doesn’t help either, said Siddhartha. “Even at 7am, the roads are packed. Vehicles just try to squeeze through wherever they can because there are no legitimate entry or exit lanes.” He still has problems when he has to sometimes drive to Gurgaon on work. “It takes me less time to fly from Delhi to Mumbai than for me to reach the airport from Noida,” he added wryly.
It’s a chain reaction. Even one car pausing for just a few seconds can trigger a gridlock lasting for 10 minutes or even more
This nightmarish stretch is finally drawing the attention of the authorities. TOI recently reported that Delhi chief secretary Dharmendra had a meeting with various agencies to devise a plan to decongest city roads. A road safety committee was set up to study the mess, consult experts and suggest fixes. The TOI report suggested that the Dhaula Kuan-Gurgaon stretch was picked for a pilot project.
Social media platforms are flooded with frustrated posts every day. “NH-48-Traffic not moving at all near the toll plaza. Massive 60-70+ min jam from Gurgaon-Delhi border to Dhaula Kuan. Anyone accountable? Or just watching the show?” posted one X user. Another pleaded: “@dtptraffic @NHAI_Official Please find a permanent solution to this jam! 30-minute standstill every day except weekends. Why?” One tweet talked of the “suffering of lakhs of daily commuters” and asked, “Where’s the plan for Dwarka-Gurgaon-Dhaula Kuan metro connectivity?”
Traffic flow is disrupted by flawed road engineering and high vehicle volume
According to traffic officials, around five lakh vehicles traverse this section daily. When TOI visited the site, it saw how the traffic on the flyover designed to handle speeds up to 70 kmph crawled at barely 20 kmph at rush hour. A bird would see the whole stretch appearing like a game of bumper cars — except no one’s having fun.
What is the origin of this chaos? One, of course, is the flawed road engineering at three points —Shankar Vihar, Hotel Lohia and Shiv Murti. These scissor cuts are where vehicles enter and exit the carriageway and their crisscrossing disrupts the traffic flow.
At Shankar Vihar, vehicles wishing to exit have to squeeze through the same space as those entering the lane from the Dwarka underpass and Rao Tula Ram Marg. This merging forces vehicles to slow down, creating a bottleneck. The same anomaly is repeated 4.3km ahead at Hotel Lohia and for the third time 2.4 km down the road near Shiv Murti on Tata Telco Road. One car pausing for even a few seconds creates a tailback 10 minutes long. Even with police personnel manning these points, the disorder is unavoidable. Without them, there would be anarchy.
Sources said the traffic police and the National Highway Authority of India are contemplating entry and exit points separated by 100 metres. A traffic officer confirmed, “If we make dedicated exit and entry lanes, it will ease the bottleneck significantly.”
But the problem isn’t just these cuts. There’s also the traffic volume to contend with. Proximity to Mahipalpur Bypass and Rangpuri crowd the road. And then there are people going to Dwarka, Gurgaon, Jaipur and to the airport.
S Velmurugan, chief scientist and head of the Traffic Engineering and Safety division at CSIR-Central Road Research Institute, explained, “At the Dhaula Kuan interchange, vehicles from around six different directions, including Karol Bagh, Sardar Patel Marg and Outer Ring Road, merge into just three lanes. Further ahead, vehicles from Vasant Vihar and Rao Tula Ram Marg add to the congestion, especially at Shankar Vihar, where the four lanes shrink to three. Clearly, volume is a big problem here. Another elevated carriageway is needed to handle the vehicular flow.”
He added that correcting the scissor cuts could help, but only briefly. Alternative routes and other remedies had to be thought of, he said.
