Enforcement and civic responsibility: Moving beyond the infrastructure blame game

Nil Konsam
Traffic congestion has become one of the most persistent public grievances, yet the diagnosis offered remains superficial. Narrow roads, insufficient flyovers, and rising vehicle numbers are repeatedly blamed, but this narrative increasingly serves as a convenient substitute for governance.
The lived experience of commuters points to a harder truth : congestion is driven less by infrastructure constraints and more by weak enforcement, poor traffic management, uncoordinated administration, and declining civic responsibility. Unless these fundamentals are addressed, infrastructure expansion will continue to deliver diminishing, and often disappointing, returns.
Even where capacity exists, it is routinely squandered. The Keisampat Junction to Airport corridor, designed as a six lane arterial road, should permit smooth flow. Instead, congestion is frequent because available road space is systematically misused. Illegal roadside parking routinely consumes entire lanes for hours. Unlike moving traffic, parking represents a static and permanent occupation of public road space, creating artificial bottlenecks that no amount of widening can offset.
Lane indiscipline further erodes efficiency. Two wheelers frequently occupy left, middle, and right lanes simultaneously, often at inconsistent speeds. This disrupts traffic harmonisation and forces larger vehicles to weave unpredictably, expanding the lateral space each vehicle occupies and sharply reducing throughput. Such congestion is not accidental; it is the predictable outcome of non enforcement of basic traffic rules.
Slow moving vehicles, carts, and non motorised traffic compound the problem when allowed to drift into faster lanes. In any functional traffic system, such vehicles are strictly confined to designated carriageways or the extreme left. When this discipline breaks down, braking cascades ripple across the network, converting minor obstructions into system wide delays. This is not a design failure, it is an operational failure.
A major weakness in current traffic policy is the absence of systematic traffic density mapping. Detailed mapping across arterial roads, main corridors, market areas, and residential lanes would expose numerous small but structurally damaging bottlenecks. In particular, many narrow lanes that merge into arterial roads function as choke points due to poor turning geometry, inadequate sight distance, and insufficient corner radii.
In many cases, widening junction corners by just a few metres would dramatically improve turning movement and restore flow. Such modest geometric corrections, replicated across junctions and merge points, offer high returns at relatively low cost, yet they remain overlooked due to the lack of granular traffic analysis.
Administrative shortcomings extend beyond traffic policing to infrastructure execution itself. Unplanned and uncoordinated works by multiple agencies—including sewage, water pipelines, and utilities—routinely create hazardous and unnecessary bottlenecks. Faulty placement of manhole covers, uneven resurfacing, poorly designed lids, and inadequate warning signage pose serious risks, especially to two-wheelers. These disruptions are not inevitable; they reflect institutional silos and weak project oversight.
Road surface quality further aggravates congestion. Potholes and broken patches force abrupt speed reductions, prompting drivers to swerve and occupy more road width. Minor maintenance failures thus escalate into major traffic breakdowns. Preventive maintenance must therefore be treated not merely as a public works obligation, but as a core traffic-management function.
Schools located along highways and major roads present another predictable pressure point. Poorly managed school transport fleets, roadside parking during drop off and pick up hours, and lack of internal circulation space routinely paralyse traffic. Schools must be strictly directed to manage their transport operations without encroaching upon public roads. Public mobility cannot be held hostage to institutional convenience.
Unchecked commercial encroachment further degrades road efficiency. Businesses operating along high volume corridors often allow customer and staff vehicles to spill onto carriageways, effectively transferring private costs onto public infrastructure. Commercial establishments must be mandated to provide dedicated or affiliated parking, with zero tolerance for violations on arterial roads.
Importantly, workable examples already exist. Neighbouring hill States such as Nagaland and Mizoram, despite severe terrain constraints and limited scope for expansion, manage traffic comparatively well. Their success rests not on infrastructure abundance, but on strong civic discipline and friendly yet firm enforcement. Their experience underscores a crucial lesson: governance and behaviour often matter more than geometry.
At the core of the traffic crisis lies a deeper governance failure, rules without enforcement and enforcement without consistency. Over time, this erodes respect for law, normalises indiscipline, and makes non compliance rational.
The way forward is clear. The administration must adopt a sustained dual strategy of motorist education and uncompromising enforcement, supported by professional traffic planning, data driven interven- tions, and inter agency coordination. Education builds durable behavioural change; enforcement ensures immediate compliance. One without the other is ineffective.
This issue therefore warrants the personal attention of the Chief Secretary and the Transport Secretary. Traffic management cuts across departments—police, public works, urban local bodies, utilities, education authorities, and commercial regulators—and only clear direction from the top can ensure coordination and accountability. What is required is not further announcements, but measurable outcomes on the ground: protected road space, disciplined enforcement, coordinated works, and safer streets.
Ultimately, traffic congestion is not an engineering problem, it is a policy and responsibility problem. Moving beyond the infrastructure blame game is no longer optional. With administrative resolve, civic discipline, and coherent policy execution, existing roads can be made safer, more efficient, and far more humane.