Hyderabad among nine Indian cities with poor road connectivity

Hyderabad: Nine out of 100 cities with the worst street-network connectivity are from India, according to a new report. Vijayawada ranks 35th in the list with an SNDi (street-network disconnectedness index) score of 4.9, while Hyderabad ranks 80th with an SNDi score of 3.8. Notably, Vijayawada is the third-worst among the nine Indian cities.

Indian cities are planning their road networks poorly, creating longer commutes. Among the nine Indian cities, Pune ranked 15th, Kolkata was at 21, Vijayawada 35, Coimbatore 46, Mumbai 50, Kozhikode 53, Singrauli 65, and Jaipur ranked 93rd on the list. Hyderabad ranks 8th among the nine Indian cities and 80th overall.

The street networks were divided into nodes (specific points) and edges (paths connecting the nodes) to measure the disconnectedness. Taking an example of two cars, the methodology determines which car will have to take the longer route, the index. The first step involves counting the number of connections for each node, the second step compares the route length with the shortest distance between neighbouring nodes, and the third step compares the road length with the shortest distance between connected nodes. The result shows the car's street network. Fewer connections, more dead-ends, and meandering routes and roads would represent a higher disconnectedness score.

According to the report, India must pay attention to this problem as the number of people using it's urban street networks is set to balloon in the coming years. India is projected to have the fastest urbanisation between 2018 and 2050 by adding 416 million more urban dwellers, nearly doubling it's urban population, according to the world urbanisation prospects 2018. India already had the second-largest urban population in the world in 2018 after China, at 461 million urban dwellers.

Talking about Hyderbad's roads, Anoop Kumar of Oscar Roads, said, " Honestly, the roads are in bad shape. There are no funds for road development, neither is there any plan to widen the roads. New roads are not being laid. The roads that we already have not been maintained for a very long time. All we see are potholes. Due to this, more time is wasted on roads and accidents occurs more frequently."