Two hours of daily gridlock around Lal Chowk are costing patients, traders and the economy dearly. The administration must move from diversions to discipline.
Every evening between 4:30 and 6:30 pm, Srinagar’s commercial heart stops breathing. Lal Chowk and the roads feeding it, MA Road, Dalgate, Jehangir Chowk and Abdullah Bridge, lock into a crawling, horn-blaring mass of metal. A ten-minute drive becomes an hour. Office-goers, traders, school vans and patients headed for hospitals sit trapped while tempers fray. What was once an occasional nuisance is now the daily signature of a city that has outgrown its roads and outlasted its traffic management.
The cost is counted in more than minutes. Patients stranded in the evening chill suffer real distress. Working people lose hours they never recover. Shopkeepers say customers simply avoid the area once the rush begins. A University of Kashmir study has estimated that congestion on just six major corridors drains nearly ₹7 crore from the economy every day, and that excludes the rest of the network. Every stalled engine burns fuel, money and patience together.
The causes are no secret. Vehicle numbers have climbed steeply while road space has barely grown. Parking areas around Lal Chowk have been swallowed by commercial encroachment, pushing cars onto narrow carriageways. Vendors eat further into usable width. Dead signals, illegal U-turns, wrong-side driving and the absence of proper bus stops complete the picture. Security checks and sudden diversions, whatever their justification, add yet another layer of delay. And traffic personnel are too often missing exactly when the pressure peaks.
The administration has tinkered with one-way systems and junction redesigns in parts of the old city, but Lal Chowk still chokes. Diversions merely move the knot from one crossing to the next. Winter, with its early darkness, will make matters worse and more dangerous. Residents are right to ask why a problem that recurs every year is still treated as a seasonal surprise. This is a failure of governance, not of geography.
Srinagar needs planning, not firefighting. Signals must be synchronised and kept working. Encroachments on parking land must be cleared without fear or favour, and designated parking strictly enforced. Public transport must become reliable enough to pull people out of private cars, and staggered office timings deserve a serious trial. Flyovers and road widening will help only if backed by daily discipline on the ground. Citizens, traders and transporters carry their share too: illegal parking and reckless driving cannot be blamed on officials alone.
The evening gridlock at Lal Chowk has stopped being a traffic story. It is a test of civic governance and urban foresight. A city that aspires to be a modern capital cannot leave its people stranded at every sunset. The mess is alarming. The response must be equally determined.
