Ahmedabad: Monday mornings see Ahmedabad’s traffic crawling at a mere 19 kilometres per hour, forcing commuters on a typical 10km journey to endure 31 minutes and 40 seconds of peak-hour agony. The streets become a parade of urban frustration with vehicles idling behind stubborn public transport buses, honking rickshaws adding to the cacophony and two-wheelers weaving through whatever gaps they can find. Monday clearly emerges as the week’s most punishing day for commuters, with evening rush hours proving even more brutal. On Monday and Friday evenings, the same 10km distance stretches into a 33 min 37 sec ordeal as speeds plummet further to 18km per hour. The data comes from TomTom’s comprehensive traffic monitoring system, which harnesses Floating Car Data (FCD) from 747 billion kilometres driven across more than 500 cities in 62 countries.The TomTom’s comprehensive traffic monitoring system tracks movement patterns through 600 million connected devices, including GPS units, navigation applications and traffic camera inputs to analyse congestion patterns and enable smart routing solutions.Ahmedabad ranks 43rd in global travel time and 367th in congestion level, behind Indian metropolitan cities such as Kolkata, Bengaluru and Pune, the former two of which are among the global top five cities with the worst travel times on the traffic index.Thursday evenings are the worst. At 6pm, when employees leave offices and children return from tuition classes, the average speed falls further to 17 km per hour. The most dysfunctional period spans from 6pm to 7pm, when multiple streams of urban life converge in predictable chaos. Office workers rushing home, students returning from classes, shoppers heading to markets and delivery executives making their rounds create a perfect storm of gridlock.“For a person who works for a corporate company, where office hours are unavoidably tied to peak hours, it is impossible to not encounter the worst kind of traffic every driving minute,” says Musheer Iqbal, 42, a marketing executive from Paldi.Sunday provides some respite from the traffic nightmare. The optimal travel windows are between 8 to 10am and 9.30 to 11pm, when morning commutes drop to a more manageable 28 minutes and 24 seconds, with speeds climbing to 21 kilometres per hour — still sluggish compared to global urban averages of 30 to 50km per hour, according to data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Health Organization (WHO). A senior official from the state’s urban development department told TOI that plans are underway to amend the General Development Control Regulations (GDCR) to introduce international-level Street Design Regulations (SDR), inspired by cities like London, Paris and Singapore. These changes will also influence city speed limits, with a proposed cap of 30 kilometres per hour in congested zones.The Roads and Buildings (R&B) department issued a resolution on Oct 15, 2022, setting speed limits for various vehicle types and roads, now enforced by Ahmedabad City Police. For cars carrying up to eight passengers, the maximum speed is 70km per hour on roads such as the SG Road and SP Ring Road. Motorcycles exceeding 100cc engine capacity and goods vehicles face a 60km per hour limit, while smaller motorcycles under 100cc are limited to 50km per hour.ENDS
