Congestion Mitigation Measure in Hyderabad – A Midnight Summer Dream?

Vehicle emission contributes highly to air pollution in Hyderabad, the rapidly growing Indian megacity. One of the main sources of the increased emission load from vehicles is the growing traffic congestion in the city. Evidence from numerous cases around the globe suggests that effective traffic management measures dealing with this problem should necessarily include both supply and demand based approaches. However, the existing traffic measures in Hyderabad only focus on the supply side: strategies that improve the physical aspects of roads by increasing the road capacity either by widening existing roads or by constructing new roads or flyovers. Demand-based approaches i.e. the strategies that aim to alter drivers ’ behaviour to reduce temporal and spatial increase of vehicle demand are vastly ignored in the city, e.g. road pricing, restrictions on car ownership or staggering working hours. Still, demand-based approaches are not a panacea, as they are not always feasible. Moreover, these strategies require an institutional syste