How unplanned growth, shrinking road space, and rising vehicles are choking the city and its people
JAHANZEB MUSHTAQ
Srinagar today feels less like a city on the move and more like a city trapped between bumpers. From Pantha Chowk to HMT, from Downtown to Hyderpora, residents find themselves squeezed into what many now call a “traffic sandwich”, hemmed in by vehicles on all sides, moving inches in what should take minutes. This is no longer an occasional inconvenience; it has become a defining feature of daily life in the summer capital.
What makes Srinagar’s traffic mess particularly worrying is that it is not driven by a single cause that can be fixed with a single intervention. It is the outcome of years of unplanned urban growth, neglect of public transport, encroached road space, and a mindset that equates development with more private vehicles and more concrete, not with better planning or humane mobility. The result is a city where getting from one end to another can feel like an endurance test, especially during office hours, school timings, or tourist season.
The numbers tell part of the story. Vehicle registrations in Jammu & Kashmir have risen sharply over the past decade, while the city’s effective road space has barely expanded. In many neighbourhoods, roads have in fact shrunk not on paper, but in practice as footpaths disappear under shop extensions, roadside parking, makeshift vendors, and permanent encroachments. A two-lane road functions like a single lane; a single-lane road often functions like a crowded alley.
At the same time, public transport has been allowed to decay. Once-familiar large buses are increasingly rare, replaced by a loosely regulated mix of minibuses, cabs, and three-wheelers that often compete, rather than coordinate, for passengers. For many citizens, especially women, students, and the elderly, public transport is either unreliable, unsafe, or simply unavailable at the right time. The predictable outcome is a rush to buy two-wheelers and small cars, adding thousands of new vehicles every year to already saturated roads.
There is also a deeper pattern at work. Srinagar has grown outwards without a corresponding vision of how people will move within and across the city. Residential colonies have come up along narrow access roads. Commercial hubs have mushroomed without adequate parking, loading space, or pedestrian facilities. Schools, coaching centres, and offices are concentrated in already congested localities, turning certain intersections into daily choke points. Every morning and evening, the same locations choke, the same people suffer, and the same excuses are repeated.
The cost of this “traffic sandwich” is not merely the time wasted in jams. It is also the stress that seeps into everyday interactions, the lost productivity for students and workers, the impact on small businesses that rely on timely deliveries, and the very real health costs of prolonged exposure to vehicle emissions. For emergency services, the gridlock is not just an irritation; it can be the difference between life and death. The sight of an ambulance wailing helplessly in a sea of unmoving cars should shame us into urgent action.
Policing and one-way diversions, while necessary, can only offer temporary relief. Fines and challans have their place, but they cannot substitute for a credible mobility plan. The city needs a clear, time-bound roadmap that addresses both demand and supply: discouraging excessive use of private vehicles in the core areas while offering attractive, dignified alternatives. That means investing in a reliable public transport backbone, reviving and modernising bus services, rationalising routes, and integrating them with last-mile options.
(The author is a social activist and researcher)