4 days ago
Border Toll Crisis: Daily Traffic Nightmares and Pollution in Delhi-NCR, ET Infra
Advt
Advt
He leaves office by 6.30pm, which ought to have left enough room for family time. Instead, for years, Harsh Bharadwaj hasn't known a weekday evening. He spends most of it on the road. What ought to have been nothing more than a 20-minute drive from Udyog Vihar in Gurgaon to Mahipalpur in Delhi is a stop-start one-hour crawl. And that's on a good day."One always gets stuck at Sirhaul toll plaza, behind hundreds of cabs that are queued up there to pay toll. After that, It's bumper-to-bumper traffic towards Delhi. Sometimes, it takes an hour just to cross Rajokri flyover from Udyog Vihar. With all the braking and accelerating, you are drained by the time you reach. The entire evening feels wasted," says Bharadwaj, echoing the plight of lakhs of people who are left to negotiate daily a traffic disaster on the border that is precipitated by toll collection - a problem everyone is aware of, but no one is willing to solve. Daily traffic just at Delhi-Gurgaon border is estimated at 3-3.5 lakh passenger car to MCD toll booths for collection of entry fee and environment compensation charge (ECC) from cabs and commercial vehicles, the capital's borders have for years been chokepoints. It's getting worse by the day as traffic volume between Delhi and the NCR cities surges, normalising the unending wait that those like Bharadwaj must put up with. With 10 major highways and expressways leading into Delhi, the capital's road grid is far superior to any other Indian city. But the gains of such a modern road network are sacrificed at its doorways."There is a dire need to find a solution to this stopping of vehicles for collecting toll before the two other expressway links - DND Flyway to Mumbai Expressway and Delhi-Dehradun Expressway - become operational. If you have physical toll collection points, the purpose of building high speed corridors is defeated. We have seen the impact of this on the Delhi-Gurgaon and Delhi-Meerut expressways," a central govt official just its method of collection, the toll itself is out of tune with the ground realities of Delhi-NCR. Though Gurgaon and Faridabad are in Haryana, and Noida, Ghaziabad in UP, the four cities with Delhi as the mother lode are in effect a continuum, together comprising India's largest urban region supporting one of the world's highest concentrations of urban this mix are millions of people who live in Delhi and work in NCR, and vice-versa. And they commute not just to work, but to party, shop and socialise. "But every time I take a cab, I have to pay ₹100 to Delhi and ₹120 to UP. This is utterly ridiculous," says Meghna, who works with a Delhi-based firm and lives in are several reasons why the central, Delhi, Haryana and UP govts - all of them now BJP-ruled - must review the toll.a. It effectively puts an additional tax on people living in Delhi-NCRb. It disincentivises people who choose public transport since all cabs need to pay entry feec. It does not distinguish between clean energy (like CNG and electric) and polluting fuels like dieseld. It mars road entries into India's capital city by clogging up borderse. The congestion it creates is a yearlong local pollution sourcef. The toll collection method is outdated. Not aligned with FASTag, it adds to congestionGovt officials TOI spoke to agreed a relook is needed and so is a redesign of all the points where MCD toll is collected, "though the best option is to remove them altogether".Recently, members of a parliamentary panel on transport had flagged the issue of huge congestion at Sirhaul, following which senior officials from NCR states and the road transport ministry have held two rounds of meetings. Sources said the roadmap to address the issue of congestion on NHs and expressways at all border points will be finalised in the next couple of weeks.
