Update: Do Bypass Roads Make Cities Less Crowded?

Bypass roads are often built to take traffic off roads and to lower vehicular pollution in the city. But they only help decongest a city if the area along the upcoming highway is fully developed with good infrastructure.

As the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway is choc-a-bloc in the peak hours, the Kundli-Manesar-Palwal (KMP) expressway is being seen as an alternative to reduce traffic. The KMP Expressway, which will pass through six districts in Haryana i.e. Sonepat, Rohtak, Jhajjar, Gurgaon, Mewat and Palwal, is expected to take 2,00,000 vehicles off Delhi's roads every day. 

A $10-billion industrial park proposed by the Chinese Wanda group that is likely to come up near Kharkhoda along the Kundli-Manesar-Palwal (KMP) Expressway will boost the real estate in adjoining areas. Process is on to acquire 3,000 acres of land to develop the park. Now, the question is whether the new highway will help decongest Delhi and reduce pollution in the region. In KMP Expressway's case, all the six districts along the path are not developed.

Even when sufficient infrastructural investments are made along the new expressway, it may take decades for 'land use' to change significantly. For example, the localities along which an expressway runs may not have proper water or sewerage connections. They may also have poor transportation networks. To take traffic off Delhi's roads, authorities will have to make huge infrastructural investments.

But, there are of course, benefits in making infrastructural investments into the periphery and surrounding districts along with building bypass roads. Private firms with a large number of employees often want large tracts of land to build offices. This is often not possible in the inner city. This is especially true of cities like Delhi, where the FSI is about 1.2. In outer areas like Gurgaon, the FSI is 1.8, while in Noida, it is 3. Land acquisition is also easier in areas like Gurgaon, which is the most sought-after office space market in India recently. Infrastructural investment in an area is equally important, merely linking areas falling through an expressway will not result in its development.

In the US and other parts of the developed West, bypass roads do not often lead to sudden shift in land use. This is because when a bypass road is built, firms do not suddenly relocate to the periphery or surrounding cities. The reason is that infrastructure is often well-developed in the West, and a new bypass road does not make much of a difference for firms, except in cases where firms need new Greenfield sites for expansion. But, this need not be very true in the case of Delhi, as the experience of Noida and Gurgaon have shown. It is also quite possible to implement major reforms in land use and zoning in newly accessible cities because the political constraints are lower. Even though the government did not make sufficient infrastructure investment in Gurgaon, private firms found alternatives. It took many decades for the Millennium City to emerge as a major investment destination.

Even if this is true, in a city like Delhi where 1,400 new cars enter the roads every day, it is improbable that traffic volumes would decline with a new bypass road. The reason is that Delhi has many potential car owners. Pollution may become more dispersed, instead of becoming concentrated within the city when real estate development spreads out to the periphery. Even if traffic volumes decline in the short run, more people will start driving when roads become less congested.