No red lights, still red every evening: Why Akshardham-Noida road chokes daily

The strange thing about the Akshardham-Noida evening jam is not that traffic slows. It is that the road appears designed to prevent exactly that.The corridor is wide, largely signalfree and meant to move vehicles quickly out of central Delhi towards east Delhi and Noida. There is no red light waiting at the usual choke point, no roundabout, no market crossing that should bring traffic to a crawl. Yet, almost every evening, brake lights begin glowing on a stretch that should have kept moving.TOI spent two evenings in early July on the corridor to track where the flow first breaks. What emerged was not one big bottleneck but a series of small interruptions. A vehicle waits where it should not. Another cuts lanes late. A cab stops for a booking. A private bus pulls over to pick up passengers.