Daily Evening Bottlenecks Choke Signal-Free Akshardham-Noida Road Corridor
Commuters travelling along the Akshardham-Noida road corridor face severe traffic congestion every evening due to artificial bottlenecks on the otherwise signal-free stretch. An investigation in early July revealed that despite the road being designed to move vehicles quickly from central Delhi to Noida and east Delhi, illegal halts by cabs and private interstate buses regularly reduce the four-lane highway to just one or two functional lanes.
The corridor is wide, largely signal-free, and features no red lights, roundabouts, or market crossings that should naturally slow down traffic. However, an investigation over two evenings in early July showed that the flow of vehicles breaks due to a series of small, continuous interruptions.
These disruptions occur when cabs stop along the roadside to accept bookings, private interstate buses pull over to board passengers, and families with luggage search for their coaches along the edge of moving traffic. Each brief halt forces the vehicles behind to brake, creating a chain reaction.
The problem worsens after evening when commuter traffic, metro-linked pickups, temple-area movement, and private interstate buses all compete for the same road edge.
Rohit Baluja, director of the Institute of Road Traffic Education, explained that the situation is fundamentally a traffic engineering failure. He noted that when four lanes of traffic are suddenly reduced to one or two, drivers lose the patience to follow an alternating zipper merge, leading to aggressive driving and road rage.
According to Baluja, a single halting vehicle triggers a "shockwave effect." When a car, bus, truck, or autorickshaw stops on a major arterial road, drivers shift into adjacent lanes to bypass it. This lane-changing forces vehicles in neighbouring lanes to brake or alter their speed, quickly spreading congestion across all lanes for several kilometres.
To resolve the issue, experts suggest that private bus pickups require designated bays away from the main road, and cab waiting must be pushed into legal pickup zones rather than being tolerated under no-parking signs.
Additional CP (traffic) Vijayanta Goyal Arya stated that regular prosecution is being carried out. Traffic police, district police, and civic bodies have held joint drives against encroachments, unauthorised parking, and wrong-side driving. Another traffic official confirmed that 10 to 15 private buses and nearly 100 cabs are fined daily on the stretch, and authorities are considering building more bus bays.
