India Expands Flyover Network To Ease City Traffic: Dr Aarti Khanchandani, Academician, Niranjan Hiranandani School Of Management And Real Estate

When the elevated corridor at Porvorim on the Mapusa–Panaji highway finally opened, it promised the usual kind of relief. The old road had spent years groaning under traffic it was never built to carry, and lifting long-distance vehicles above the local cross-streets was supposed to cut travel times cleanly across north Goa's main spine. But right alongside the ribbon-cutting came a far more telling move, Goa's Public Works Department brought in the Indian Institute of Management Nagpur to carry out a full traffic decongestion study across the network.

That timing gives the game away. Even while celebrating a brand-new concrete flyover, officials seemed to already know what commuters live with every day: pouring more tarmac without understanding the wider network just pushes the jam down to the next signal.

In the last two decades, hundreds of thousands of crores have been spent by municipal corporations on underpasses, bypasses, flyovers and elevated highways. But the average speed of traffic continues to fall, not rise.

Statistics confirm everything that commuting people were always talking about. As per the TomTom Traffic Index 2025, Indian cities are among the worst in the world when it comes to traffic speed. Bengaluru tops the list in the country with its 74.4% congestion, while Pune comes second with its 71.1% congestion. Mumbai ranks third with its 63.2%, Delhi fourth with its 60.2%, Kolkata fifth with its 58.9%, Jaipur sixth with its 58.7%, Chennai seventh with its 58.6% and Hyderabad eighth with its 55.5%.

Let us take Delhi as an example. It is the city having some of the widest boulevards and the maximum paved road area in the entire India, but even a simple journey of 10 kilometres takes around 24 minutes on average. If we take annual figures, then a usual Delhi commuter spends around 104 hours in traffic jams during peak hours.

While the common belief that there are more cars than there are roads holds some truth, the real issue lies elsewhere. As these cities have developed over the last twenty years, housing has been built further and further from the centre city areas where job opportunities, schools and commercial districts are all concentrated, causing millions of residents to travel to the heart of the city every day in long radial commutes with no realistic alternatives other than the use of a car.

As public transport services are non-existent and the metro rail station three kilometres away lacks even a pedestrian pathway to reach there, owning either a motorcycle or a second-hand hatchback becomes a necessity rather than a choice.

On hitting the streets, however, design flaws are apparent everywhere. Unlike other cities where there could be problems anywhere, the problems with Indian roads are at specific pinch points. The road could be a wide six-lane carriageway which narrows down to two lanes as it crosses an old railway line or passes through a roundabout. On the side of the road, double parking of cars, trucks and street vendors effectively takes up a third of the road.

This is also why flyovers so often fail to fix gridlock on their own. Transport planners have a term for it, induced demand but ordinary drivers experience it directly. A new flyover or a widened expressway makes driving easier at first. People who used to take the train, share a cab, or travel outside peak hours start driving instead. New housing comes up along the corridor soon after. Within four or five years, the shiny new elevated deck is just as jammed as the surface road it was meant to relieve.

Bengaluru's Outer Ring Road is often cited as the clearest example of this cycle, two decades of near-continuous flyover construction and the city still posts a congestion score of 74.4 percent.

The cost of all this goes well beyond frayed tempers on the evening commute. Gridlock burns fuel, delays supply chains, slows down deliveries and can cost ambulances minutes that matter. The constant idling also blankets neighbourhoods in fine dust and exhaust, quietly adding to the healthcare bill down the line.

Fixing this will mean giving up on the idea that concrete alone can solve a mobility crisis. Urban planners point to a set of fixes that are far less glamorous than a new flyover but arguably more effective. Running more city buses on dedicated lanes with reliable schedules moves far more people per hour than the same road filled with single-occupancy cars. Upgrading traffic signals to respond to actual vehicle queues, rather than running on fixed timers, would ease pressure at choke points. Redesigning intersections, wider turning radii, dedicated right-turn pockets, and proper footpaths would keep pedestrians out of the path of moving traffic. And pricing kerbside parking properly, instead of letting public roads double as free all-day vehicle storage, is a reform that groups like the Observer Research Foundation have pushed for alongside congestion pricing in city centres.

Which brings the story back to Goa and its partnership with IIM Nagpur. The Porvorim flyover solves one immediate bottleneck. But real decongestion will depend on tracking where people are actually travelling to and from, fixing the feeder routes that connect to the main road and giving commuters a genuine alternative to taking the car out of the driveway.