POINT TAKEN
A City That Cannot Move: Srinagar's Gridlock Is Not a Traffic Problem, It Is a Governance Failure Three road projects announced. AI systems promised. Smart City funds deployed. The gridlock deepens anyway.
Srinagar is not gridlocked occasionally. It is gridlocked permanently from Parimpora to Lal Chowk, from Boulevard Road to Rajouri Kadal, Soura to Safakadal, every arterial corridor of a city whose medieval road architecture was never engineered to carry the vehicle load of a 21st-century administrative capital. That mismatch is not new. What is new is the absence of any credible explanation for why, with Smart City funding, traffic technology, and three major road projects announced as recently as February 2026, the condition worsens rather than resolves. The structural failures are identifiable without a consultant's report. Road margin encroachments go unchallenged for years until crisis forces belated crackdowns that last one season. Public transport, the only scalable solution to urban congestion at Srinagar's density, remains chronically underfunded, operationally unreliable, and, where Smart City buses exist, intermittently suspended. Srinagar Traffic Police deserve acknowledgement for experimental one-way interventions at Rajouri Kadal, Barbarshah, and Chota Bazar. These are the manoeuvres of a department managing collapse, not a city preventing it. An AI-based traffic management system has been announced. Announcements do not unsnarl Residency Road at eight in the morning. What Srinagar requires is a time-bound, accountability-fixed master mobility plan integrating road infrastructure, public transport, parking policy, and encroachment enforcement under a single executing authority with the mandate and muscle to deliver. The DC's office confirms three road projects are in the pipeline. Pipeline is not pavement. Until gridlock is treated as the civic emergency it is, Srinagar will remain a city that announces movement while standing still.
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