Sustainability of national highway system in India : lessons learnt

Abstract

India is going through a transitional phase of economic growth and development in recent years. The Government of India has invested a significant amount of fund for road development throughout India. A significant percentage of these roads are high speed roadways. While there is a false notion about the functional characteristics of these highways— classifying them as “uninterrupted flow facilities”, often these highways are what is known as multilane highway elsewhere. Thus, the access controls of these highways are close to (or even worse than) multilane highways and in no way near to “truem uninterrupted flow facilities”. This has implications both on mobility and safety— the two very important indicators of sustainability. The situation is even more difficult since the needs of road users in mixed traffic are very different and often conflicting. The obvious result is that vulnerable road users (VRU) like bicycles and pedestrians are often at high risk due primarily to the absence of adequate facilities, or due to ill planning or design of such facilities. However, a recent case study conducted near Kharagpur, over a 100km stretch of National Highway (NH) provided somewhat interesting insights to this problem. There are strong evidences that 3Es “engineering”, “education” and “enforcement” have their distinct role in making the study stretch of NH to be unsafe and non-sustainable in its present form to such an extent that noble cause of road development is questioned. Some areas of improvements are identified with appropriate countermeasures so that concerned authorities adopt a plan for safe and sustainable NH.