Under the most recent developments, the Punjab and Haryana High court has specifically identified the holistic town-planning followed by Chandigarh to be the sole key to the long-term virtue of gridlock which plagues its multiple highway corridors. At one of the hearings on a public interest plea, the bench gave credit to the city?s integrated strategy that includes zoning, dedicated service lanes, and co-ordinated signal regime, as a model that can again bring orderly flow of vehicles and improved road safety. Advocates on behalf of the Chandigarh Administration pointed to decades of vision in the land use and transport planning, which allowed avoiding development anarchy and has been branded favorably by the Court.
The observation by High Court comes as people are complaining about daily traffic congestions at major entry points into the city. To tame the highway madness, the bench has asked the civic body of Chandigarh to single-out a comprehensive traffic resolution framework within four weeks which should be based on the master plan which is already in place. Some legal experts think this judicial blessing may provide impetus to other planning-based interventions in other adjacent states and who knows maybe advisories on this weekend traffic, which will be the first of many news-worthy updates on a new age of corridor management in the region.