Delhi Police seeks urgent Barapullah Phase-III redesign as new flyover worsens jams

Delhi Traffic Police has asked the PWD to urgently redesign the Sundial Park merger on Barapullah Phase-III flyover. The bottleneck is turning promised relief into longer queues by forcing several traffic streams into two lanes.

In Short

• Current layout near Sundial Park worsens congestion on busy corridor
• Phase-III flyover intended to ease traffic but caused delays over 1 hour
• Inspection found lane mismatch and sharp junction alignment issues

The Delhi Traffic Police has asked the Public Works Department to urgently redesign a merger point on the newly-opened Barapullah Phase-III flyover, saying its current layout is worsening congestion on the busy corridor. Officials said the problem has emerged near Sundial Park, where the new stretch joins the existing Barapullah corridor.

The intervention comes within days of the opening of the Phase-III flyover, which was expected to improve connectivity between south Delhi and areas towards Mayur Vihar and Sarai Kale Khan, while reducing pressure on existing arterial roads.

Instead, the traffic situation deteriorated soon after the opening, with commuters on the nearly 8-km stretch between Safdarjung Hospital and Sarai Kale Khan taking more than an hour to complete the journey by Thursday evening, officials said.

A joint inspection by senior traffic police and PWD officials on October 1 found several geometric and traffic flow-related problems at the merger point near Sundial Park. In a letter to the PWD, the traffic police said the configuration is resulting in "significant traffic congestion", particularly because of the exceptionally high traffic volume on the newly-opened corridor.

A drone survey by the traffic police showed the scale of the problem at the junction, where multiple traffic streams converge within a limited road width. The Phase-III flyover has three lanes.

At the same point, another three lanes of traffic coming from the Sundial side towards Sarai Kale Khan and Ring Road merge with the corridor. Three more lanes carrying traffic from the Ashram and DND side also join the existing Barapullah corridor.

However, the existing flyover narrows to two lanes at that stretch, creating a sharp mismatch between the number of lanes feeding into the junction and the capacity available ahead, police said.

The traffic police also said the physical design makes the situation worse, as the new flyover meets the existing one near Sundial through a relatively sharp or rectangular alignment rather than a smooth curve. The letter said this leads to abrupt merging of traffic and creates a bottleneck at the junction.

Police said the arrangement is especially problematic because of the heavy traffic being generated by the new corridor. Vehicles approaching from different directions have to merge within a constrained section, slowing overall movement and creating recurring choke points.

The traffic police has asked the PWD to redesign the merger instead of relying only on enforcement and traffic regulation, saying corrective engineering measures at the Sundial merger are needed so that the added capacity of the new flyover results in smoother traffic movement rather than shifting congestion to the point where the new and existing corridors meet.

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