Ahmedabad Built More Roads But Now Needs A Street Policy

Ahmedabad is preparing its first city-scale road decongestion policy, with the Gujarat government finalising a new framework to tackle traffic bottlenecks, unsafe junctions, illegal parking, stray cattle and road encroachments across Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation limits. The policy, expected to be rolled out after the new AMC elected body formally takes charge, will create a joint enforcement-and-design mechanism led by the municipal commissioner and police commissioner to redesign how Ahmedabad’s streets are used rather than simply adding more asphalt.

This is a significant shift: Ahmedabad is no longer treating congestion as only a traffic police problem or a flyover shortage. The Gujarat government is now framing Ahmedabad’s road crisis as a public-space management issue involving engineering, parking discipline, pedestrian movement, roadside occupation and signal coordination under one umbrella civic policy.

The timing is not accidental.

Over the last year, Ahmedabad has continued widening corridors and sanctioning new roads, but vehicle pressure has risen faster than street usability. AMC’s 2026–27 budget alone provides for nearly 200 km of new roads, eight iconic road redevelopments and a major S G Highway urban revamp, while AUDA has separately committed over ₹2,189 crore for upgrading the 76-km Sardar Patel Ring Road and multiple junction underpasses outside the core city. Yet despite this physical road-building, the state now acknowledges that movement remains clogged because intersections, parking spillover, informal occupation and mixed street use are not being governed uniformly.

That distinction matters.

Ahmedabad has spent years building mobility infrastructure outward — ring roads, TP roads, corridor widening, elevated connectors — but the lived congestion problem inside the city persists on ordinary commuter stretches from Navrangpura, Ellisbridge and Ashram Road to S G Highway service lanes, Maninagar junctions, Jamalpur market edges and Naroda industrial corridors. These are not always roads lacking width; they are roads where lane discipline collapses under parking, hawker spillover, median breaches, unmanaged turns and poor pedestrian crossings.

Under the draft policy, officials are now proposing adaptive traffic control systems, key junction redesign, stronger parking infrastructure, zero-tolerance anti-encroachment action, pedestrian-first interventions and select railway overbridges. A standing apex committee will reportedly review implementation every two months, making this less of a one-time campaign and more of a monitored operational framework.

Ahmedabad’s planning trade-off is visible here.

For nearly a decade, the dominant civic instinct was to solve movement through corridor expansion — more roads, wider medians, new bridges, longer peripheral links. This new Ahmedabad road policy signals that the government now sees a harder truth: a city can keep adding carriageway and still lose road capacity if street edges remain unmanaged.

That is why this policy is also tied to encroachment removal and public discipline, not just civil construction. Officials have explicitly linked road unclogging to reclaiming footpaths, service lanes, medians and open public stretches from unregulated use.

For residents, the immediate implication is that Ahmedabad may soon see more aggressive street interventions than conventional roadworks — stricter parking restrictions, redesigned junction turns, vendor displacement on some corridors, cattle clearance, altered signal timings and pedestrian restructuring. Whether this improves commute time will depend on execution consistency, but the state has clearly accepted that Ahmedabad’s road problem is no longer just about shortage of roads.

What now exists is a policy pivot: Ahmedabad is moving from building roads at the city’s edges to trying to recover movement on the roads it already has.