Comprehensive mobility plan to be released in August

More than six months after it was first due, the Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority’s comprehensive mobility plan (CMP) for the city will be released for public feedback by August 15, GMDA officials confirmed on Friday.

Draft reports of the plan have already been reviewed by the GMDA, which is awaiting a final version from Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture(SPA), the organisation tasked with drafting the CMP.

The initial deadline for the creation of the CMP, which is mandated under the GMDA Act, was set for December last year, but it ended up being delayed due to problems in collecting traffic data.

In July 2018, the GMDA signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the SPA for conducting a six-month-long survey in the city, the results of which would be used to draft a CMP.

The execution of the surveys had been outsourced to a third-party agency.

“The quality of data from the surveys, which were submitted to the GMDA and the SPA in October last year, turned out to be quite shoddy,” GMDA chief executive officer V Umashankar said, adding that the traffic surveys had to be conducted all over again, this time by the SPA itself.

Umashankar added that the surveys have been carried out, and the data collated and analysed.

Officials in both the GMDA and experts in the SPA remained tight-lipped about the surveys’ specific findings. “We will be releasing a copy of the draft plan by August 15 on our website to which the public will have access. There will also be a specified time frame for citizens to provide their comments and raise objections,” Umashankar said.

The CMP promises to be the most authoritative study on Gurugram’s traffic challenges since 2009, when a similar study was conducted by a private consultancy firm.

The following year, the department of town and country planning also published an integrated mobility plan (IMP) for the Gurgaon-Manesar Urban Complex.

“However, to understand and address Gurugram’s present challenges, we required fresh data,” said Sewa Ram, a transport systems and design expert at SPA, who spearheaded the surveys.

He added that the CMP would broadly touch upon some of the problems in Gurugram that have become more pronounced over the last nine years.

These include an increase in disorganised parking, lack of pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, inflow and outflow of bypassable traffic, and clogging of high volume junctions, among others.

Sewa Ram added that the CMP will make short-term (five years), mid-term (10 years), and long-term (15 years) recommendations to improve mobility as part of the Gurugram-Manesar Master Plan, 2031.