Service road solution to Ribbon Development

India has witnessed spectacular growth in the construction of national highways over the past decade, which has given the country the second-largest road network after the United States. The hard reality is that nearly 36% of the fatal road accidents in the country are now reported on national highways, 25% on state highways, and 31% on other roads. The lack of adequate service roads leads to the merger of short-distance local traffic with fast-moving traffic along national highways and has become a key contributing factor to rising road fatalities. Ironically, the Indian Road Congress (IRC) identified the problem and also recommended measures to solve it way back in 1974, but the rush to increase the highway length has relegated it to the background. In its special publication “Ribbon Development along highways and its Prevention,” the IRC highlighted that the inevitable result of ribbon development in the suburbs of cities has been an enormous increase in congestion on the highways. With the opening of industries, commercial establishments, and residential units, a multitude of local users swarm and choke the road. Pedestrians from the residential units have to use the main highway for every single purpose, such as shopping, going to offices, going to schools and colleges, taking recreational walks, etc. Pedestrian traffic from one side of the highway to the other can be enormous, causing serious impediments to the through flow on the highway, adds the IRC report. One can imagine the scale of the problem of ribbon development flagged by the IRC now that the total length of national highways has increased by 59% to 1.45 lakh km in 2022–23 from 91,287 km in 2013–14. Apart from various exiting establishments, including residential houses and buildings, new establishments also come up just abutting the Right of Way (RoW) of national highways after notification of a road as a national highway or expansion of existing highways, as well as green field highways. The IRC document pointed out that “the congestion caused by mixed local traffic creates a steep increase in accidents” as the number of intersections increases after “a network of closely-spaced streets at right angles to the main highway gets built”, to provide access to users on and off the highway. Apart from other solutions, it harped on the construction of service roads to limit the access to the highway while simultaneously meeting the demand of the local people. Arguments advanced by IRC for insisting upon the construction of service roads along all highways are that they can prevent congestion on the highway due to purely local traffic and also reduce the number of intersections. It also envisaged acquiring land for service roads sufficiently in advance, even though construction may not come up immediately, and underscored the need for the Central government to evolve a scheme in consultation with the State government to meet the fund requirement for service roads on national highways. The policy adopted by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways focuses on taking up the development of all new national highways in the configuration of divided 4-lane carriageways and above as access-controlled highways, wherever feasible, and all green-field 4-lane national highway projects with the facility of closed tolling, where access to and exit from a national highway is allowed only at pre-determined points so as to ensure seamless movement of traffic and road safety and that a road user pays toll only for the stretch used. Toll revenue has jumped from Rs 4,770 crore in 2013-14 to Rs 41,342 crore in 2022–23, and the MoRTH has set the target of increasing it to Rs 1,30,000 crore by 2030. However, that has not helped address the problem of the merger of local traffic with highway traffic at intersections outside the tolled stretches, as service roads along the highways continue to be missing and discontinuous in many areas. In its revised guideline on the construction of access to fuel stations, residential properties, and other establishments, the MoRTH insists that the state governments and other infrastructure development agencies make provisions for service roads connecting the two points at their own expense outside the RoW of any such access-controlled facility. This implies that the state governments also need to play a crucial role in ensuring the provision of service roads for safe local traffic. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport recommends that it is important for road-owning agencies to address discontinuous service lanes to ensure the safety of local traffic and minimize the risks associated with merging the service lanes with the main highway. The committee observed that discontinuous or inadequate service roads force local vehicles to enter the highway to continue their journey, which significantly increases collision risks. Ribbon development along national highways is a hard reality that is also unavoidable. The central and state governments must prioritise the construction of service roads to make highways safer.