Ring Roads: The allure and cost of asphalt loops

Hindustan Times

3 days ago

The Delhi government recently proposed a lofty solution to the city's chronic traffic woes: an elevated ring road stacked atop the existing 55-kilometre Ring Road, a plan now set for a feasibility study. But, Delhi is not the only city to rely on a ring road to keep traffic free-flowing. Hyderabad's 158-km Outer Ring Road, finished in 2018, sparked a real estate boom. (Shutterstock)
Across India, cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Lucknow, Pune, and Chennai are all either building or have announced plans for new orbital roads, with names as layered as the roads themselves: ORR (Outer Ring Road), PRR (Peripheral Ring Road), and now RRR (Regional Ring Road), often in collaboration with the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI).
Once imagined as a way to connect fast-growing suburbs beyond the city core — not necessarily to decongest — these roads have since morphed into high-stakes mobility projects promising relief from the gridlock choking India's cities.
Yet as these new loops of asphalt take shape — the existing ones already battling the very congestion they were meant to avoid — a pressing question looms: do ring roads really cure chronic traffic woes, or do they fuel unsustainable sprawl, quietly reshaping the geography and chemistry of the cities they were meant to unclog?
Tracing the ring road's journey
In the 1920s and 1930s, Europe pioneered highway ring roads. Berlin's AVUS (1921), Munich's Mittlerer Ring (planned in the 1930s), and London's North and South Circular Roads (1920s–1930s) were the early ring roads, built not to ease traffic jams — vehicle ownership was still low — but to enhance urban connectivity and organise growing cities by linking suburbs, radial roads, and industrial zones.
After World War II, car ownership surged, prompting new rings like London's M25 and Berlin's A10 to tackle rising congestion.
India's first ring road was built in Delhi. In the mid-1950s, still reeling from Partition and overcrowded with refugees, city planners prepared the Interim General Plan for Greater Delhi (1958–59) , a precursor to the Master Plan for Delhi (1962). This, said AK Jain, former commissioner (planning), Delhi Development Authority (DDA), envisioned three concentric road loops: an Inner Ring Road, a Ring Road and an Outer Ring Road. 'The aim, inspired partly by European models, was to spatially organise the growing city, linking new refugee colonies to the traditional core,' said Jain. 'So, connectivity — not decongestion — was the original plan.'
In practice, only two continuous ring roads were built — Ring Road, completed in the 1960s, and Outer Ring Road, completed in the early 1980s. The central government, Jain added, encouraged state governments to prepare similar blueprints for ring roads for their capital cities.
Other cities saw merit in the idea and began charting their own circular arteries. Chennai, for example, built its 25.2-km Inner Ring Road in the 1970s, followed by a 62-km Outer Ring Road completed in 2021, and is now working on a 132.87-km Peripheral Ring Road slated for completion by January 2026.
Bengaluru's 60-km Outer Ring Road, built in the 1990s, is already congested, and land acquisition for a new 73-km Peripheral Ring Road is currently in progress. Ahmedabad completed its 76-km Sardar Patel Ring Road in 2004 and is now planning a third ring road. Hyderabad's 158-km Outer Ring Road, completed in 2018, sparked a real estate boom, with a 340-km Regional Ring Road now proposed. Nagpur's 64-km Outer Ring Road is nearing completion, while Pune's ambitious 170-km ring road, currently under construction, aims to ease traffic by 2027.
The rationale of the ring road
The appeal of a ring road, say experts, is pretty simple: divert traffic, unclog the city's core, and create 'growth corridors' for housing and business without overwhelming existing infrastructure. In theory, it's a win-win.
In practice, though, ring roads in India have often fuelled unplanned sprawl. By opening up peripheral land, they encourage low-density, car-dependent development, weakening the case for public transport and deepening reliance on private vehicles.
Hyderabad's ORR, designed for speed and seamless connectivity — linking several highways, and cutting airport commutes from the financial district to under 30 minutes — also unleashed a massive real estate boom. Today, more than 60% of Hyderabad's new commercial space lies within 10km of the ORR. Unsurprisingly, the road already strains under its own success. Junctions like Gachibowli and Nanakramguda face daily gridlocks as narrow service lanes choke during peak hours. The bypass designed for high-speed travel is, many say, being slowly swallowed by the very city it was meant to skirt.
Bengaluru's experience is similarly instructive. 'Ring roads are seductive in their simplicity — build a bypass, move the traffic out, and free up the core. But Indian cities, particularly Bengaluru, defy that logic,' said city-based architect and urban designer Naresh Narasimhan. 'The ORR was never just a ring road for long. It quickly became a spine for speculative real estate, tech parks, and gated communities. What was meant to divert traffic ended up attracting it.'
He warned the city's proposed PRR risks repeating the pattern 'unless we completely rethink what we mean by a ring road'.
S Velmurugan, chief scientist and head of the traffic engineering and safety division at the Central Road Research Institute (CRRI), points out that Bengaluru and Chennai are further constrained by limited road networks — about 8,500km and 7,000km respectively — compared to Delhi's 33,000km, which has an extensive radial road network that ensures better traffic flow. 'Ring roads in these cities got congested within a few years as urban growth outpaced road capacity. Instead of serving long-distance travel, they began handling short intra-city trips,' he said. 'I don't think Delhi's plan to build an elevated ring road over the existing one will solve anything. It will only promote car use. Ring roads have become part of the problem — not the solution.'
Rewiring the city
For Hitesh Vaidya, urban expert and former director, National Institute of Urban Affairs ( NIUA), the sprawl triggered by ring roads is more than a spatial issue — it chips away at governance, social cohesion, and the very identity of cities.
'There's a limit to how far we can 'metropolitanise' in the name of economic growth and connectivity. Cities cannot expand indefinitely — we need to define their carrying capacity,' he said.
Vaidya noted that cities once had a clear distinction between a dense core and a looser periphery. But as ring roads push boundaries outward, that distinction blurs. 'The core keeps expanding until the idea of a periphery disappears altogether. This leads to unplanned, fragmented growth that dilutes the essential character and form of a city.'
Governance also becomes more complex. Peripheral areas eventually have to be pulled into the urban fold and brought under municipal corporations, straining administration. 'You end up either creating mega-municipal bodies that are impossible to manage — or breaking them into smaller corporations, which isn't ideal either,' he said.
The environmental costs are equally troubling, added Delhi-based architect and urban designer Manit Rastogi: loss of green cover, disruption of natural water systems, and displacement of communities. 'In the name of easing traffic, we often weaken a city's ecological resilience and disrupt long-standing social networks,' he said.
Vaidya argued that India should invest in satellite towns and small to medium-sized cities rather than concentrating economic activity on the fringes of megacities. 'We haven't had a comprehensive national study of India's urbanisation patterns since the National Commission on Urbanisation was set up in 1984, which analysed migration, sprawl, and infrastructure gaps following the 1981 Census,' he said. 'It's time to revisit our planning principles — not just to ease congestion, but to preserve what makes a city livable and legible.'
OP Agarwal, retired IAS officer and former CEO of World Resources Institute (India), who was the lead author of the National Urban Transport Policy 2006, said, 'An elevated corridor running from point A to point B might be more effective than ring roads. At least it wouldn't trigger sprawl.' Citing Beijing as a cautionary tale, he added,'Beijing has five ring roads and sprawls across 5,000 square kilometres — over three times Delhi's 1,600 square kilometres.'
As Tim Miller writes in his book China's Urban Billion, ring roads increase 'the potential area for urban development in one stroke, as all land within an orbital will quickly become fair game for development'.
The road ahead
As India pours billions into new ring roads, the question remains: can they deliver the free-flowing cities they promise? Experts argue the answer lies not in more asphalt, but in rethinking urban mobility itself.
Cities, they say, need to prioritise mobility over mere movement — investing in bus networks, cycle lanes, and pedestrian infrastructure.
Velmurugan stressed that in cities such as Chennai and Bengaluru, the only real solution is a robust expansion of public transport, particularly metro rail, since there's little space left for new road infrastructure.
Mobility expert Shreya Gadepalli, based in Chennai, said that ring roads often fail due to poor land-use planning around them. 'If ring roads are to serve their original purpose, governments must regulate development along both sides through strict land-use controls,' she said. 'There should be limited access points, heavy tolls, and other disincentives for local traffic to use them.'
But, she acknowledged a more likely future. 'Governments are increasingly treating ring roads as tools of urban economic growth, not just traffic solutions. That means they'll inevitably morph into arterial urban roads. If that's the case, we might as well plan them that way — make them inclusive, multimodal corridors with dedicated lanes for buses, safe pedestrian infrastructure, and protected cycling tracks.'
Narasimhan agreed. 'If Bengaluru's upcoming PRR is to serve the city's future, it cannot be built only for car owners. 'We must design for those who walk, cycle, or use public transport — which, frankly, is the majority. This isn't idealism — it's a survival strategy for an already gridlocked city.'
The idea of the ring road need not be discarded — it can be reimagined, said Rastogi. 'Cities are not machines; they are living environments shaped by history, climate, and the daily lives of their residents. Roads must work within this system, not in opposition to it.'