It is a planning mistake Srinagar cannot afford
Srinagar is once again at a turning point. The recent revival by the R&B Department of a flyover-cum-bridge connecting Convent Road in Rajbagh to the Sangarmal corridor has triggered deep concern among planners, hydrologists, environmentalists, and residents. A blurry walkthrough circulated unofficially suggests that a Detailed Project Report may have been prepared, yet nothing about the proposal reflects the level of professional rigour, planning logic, or public transparency required for a project of this magnitude.
This is not a routine road extension or neighbourhood improvement.
This is a proposal to carve a concrete expressway through Srinagar’s most sensitive riverfront, its most densely inhabited school zone, and the heart of its central business district. It is a proposal that violates the Master Plan, contradicts decades of mobility planning, threatens the Jhelum’s already fragile flood behaviour, and jeopardizes the city’s largest public spaces and school precincts. And worst of all: the flyover does not solve congestion. It relocates it—and makes it worse.
This is not conjecture. It is what traffic science, hydrology, urban design, and global experience all tell us.
Without DPR, Process, and Logic
According to information available, the project appears to have emerged without credible traffic modelling, hydrological analysis, stormwater studies, road geometry checks, or urban design assessments. The circulated visuals lack technical clarity and seem to have been created outside any formal professional framework.
Past Master Plans—from 1971 onwards—rejected similar proposals at far smaller scale. The current plan appears to bypass every safeguard that planning law requires. Bids floated earlier for mobility solutions at Convent and Parimpora were either cancelled or remained inconclusive. How a new DPR surfaced without re-tendering remains unexplained. Who prepared it? Under what mandate? On what data? These are not procedural details; they go to the heart of legitimacy.
The absence of due process is not a technical omission. It is a planning red flag.
A Step Backward
The proposed location is among the most sensitive and complex in Srinagar’s urban geography:
• a dense residential precinct,
• three major educational institutions,
• narrow internal roads,
• the Bund promenade,
• the Polo Ground green corridor,
• culturally valuable riverfronts, and
• the heart of the city’s commercial movement.
A city that has spent the past decade reclaiming its downtown streets—Polo View, the Bund, the riverfront, and Lal Chowk—cannot afford a flyover that resets the clock to a 1980s model of car-dominated urbanism.
Srinagar Smart City has invested heavily in pedestrian promenades, riverfront activation, traffic calming, and heritage streetscapes. All of these will be significantly degraded by a flyover that slices through the centre like a concrete blade.
Cities today fight to remove flyovers from their cores, not build new ones. Seoul dismantled Cheonggyecheon viaduct; San Francisco removed the Embarcadero; Portland tore down Harbor Drive; Madrid, Boston, and Singapore restored riverfronts by burying or eliminating elevated highways. Srinagar must not bring back the very model the world is discarding.
Harbor Drive, Portland Oregon, USA
Portland, Oregon removed its Harbor Drive riverfront freeway in 1974, replacing it with the now-iconic Tom McCall Waterfront Park and converting the Hawthorne Bridge into a pedestrian and cycling route. This transformation became a landmark example of how cities can reclaim riverfronts from car-centric infrastructure and restore vibrant public space.
Cheonggyecheon elevated highway, Seoul – South Korea
Seoul dismantled the Cheonggyecheon elevated highway—once a noisy, polluted corridor carrying 160,000 vehicles a day—to restore the historic canal beneath it as a linear public park. The project revitalised surrounding neighbourhoods, cooled the city, and became a global model of people-centred urban regeneration.
A Legally Inconsistent Project
The Srinagar Master Plan 2035 is unambiguous.
On Page 138, it states that the only permissible intervention near Convent School is a short connector from the existing skewed pedestrian bridge to Residency Road. There is no provision for a new vehicular bridge, let alone a flyover landing in Rajbagh.
Any project that contradicts a notified Master Plan is legally invalid unless the Plan is formally amended—a process requiring public consultation, expert review, and government notification. None of this has occurred.
The law is clear. The proposed flyover is not.
Not a Mobility Gap—Just Mobility Misunderstanding
Within a radius of less than a kilometre, Srinagar already has:
- Abdullah Bridge
• Zero Bridge
• Lal Mandi Footbridge
There is no missing link, no network gap, no bottleneck that a new bridge resolves. Introducing a fourth structure only cannibalizes existing traffic patterns and pushes new vehicular pressure into narrow neighbourhood streets with no capacity to absorb it.
Traffic engineering is not magic.
Flyovers do not “solve” congestion; they shift it. They create downstream bottlenecks, multiply conflict points, and induce more vehicles. A flyover always delivers two minutes of relief before ten minutes of new congestion. This is not opinion; it is established transport science.
In this case, the proposed structure will funnel fast-moving traffic directly into the confined lanes of Rajbagh and Jawahar Nagar—streets designed for local circulation, not regional flow. The outcome will be predictable: gridlock, unsafe speed differences, and chaos around SP School, Convent School and the hospitality institute.
Hydrological suicide in the city’s deepest flood basin
Rajbagh and Jawahar Nagar were the deepest, longest-flooded parts of Srinagar in 2014. Any obstruction in this zone—piers, ramps, embankment reinforcements—directly reduces floodplain storage, alters water velocity, increases erosive pressure at river bends, and raises upstream inundation levels.
A flyover across a riverbank in a bowl-shaped, flood-fragile Himalayan city is not just bad planning. It is dangerous.
The Jhelum is already struggling under siltation, encroachment, narrowed cross-sections, and insufficient outflow. Adding concrete infrastructure at one of its critical bends will only magnify risk during the next high-intensity precipitation event.
Urban planners can debate many things.
Hydrology is not one of them.
The urban design damage will be irreversible
Over the past few years, Srinagar has regained the soul of its riverfront. The Bund is alive again. People walk, gather, sit, socialize. Cafés, cultural spaces, small shops, and river-facing promenades have brought back the charm that once defined the city’s identity.
A flyover will destroy this.
- It will cast permanent shadows along the Bund.
• It will sever pedestrian continuity.
• It will turn human-scale streets into under-flyover voids.
• It will degrade the Sunday Market’s civic energy.
• It will threaten public green spaces of the Polo Ground precinct.
• It will introduce noise and pollution above school playgrounds.
Few cities are gifted with a river as intimate and culturally embedded as the Jhelum. To overshadow it with a flyover is to erase its spirit.
A risk to children, public health, and school safety
Three major educational institutions sit directly in the impact zone: SP Higher Secondary, Convent School, and the Institute of Hotel Management. These are not abstract locations—they are daily routes for thousands of young students.
A flyover at the height proposed in the visuals would bring noisy vehicles within direct eye-level visibility of classrooms. It would expose children to continuous PM2.5 emissions, vehicular noise, and compromised privacy.
No responsible city in the world would build an elevated highway next to a school.
Geometry makes the project unbuildable
Even if the flyover were somehow engineered, the approach roads needed to make it safe and functional do not exist. Standard flyover geometry requires:
- 4–6 lane approaches
• safe turning radii
• pedestrian segregation
• emergency lay-bys
• proper sight distances
None of these can be achieved without demolishing private homes, shops, public parks, or mature trees—including heritage chinars. Even if politically possible, the geometry remains infeasible.
This is not a design challenge. It is a physical impossibility.
Better solutions already exist
Srinagar has alternatives that meet mobility needs without ecological, cultural, or social destruction:
- Possible widening of Abdullah Bridge to a 4-lane bridge
- Controlled redesign of Zero Bridge
- Water taxi system along the Jhelum
- Modern traffic management and intersection redesign
- Pedestrian-priority and parking management in CBD
These are not theoretical ideas; they are standard, globally validated mobility measures that cost less, perform better, and preserve the city’s identity.
The choice before us
The Convent–Sangarmal flyover is not a mobility solution.
It is a planning error—technically unsound, environmentally unsafe, urbanistically damaging, and legally inconsistent with Srinagar’s own Master Plan.
Cities today are repairing the damage caused by flyovers constructed decades ago. Srinagar cannot afford to repeat the mistakes that the world has long abandoned.
The real choice before policymakers is simple:
Do we build for cars—or do we build for people?
Do we repeat outdated ideas—or protect our riverfront?
Do we surrender our public spaces—or strengthen them?
Srinagar’s future depends on choosing wisely. Our river, our neighbourhoods, our heritage, our children, and our resilience demand no less.
Iftikhar Hakim, an urban and transport planner with over three decades of experience in regional and metropolitan planning, including major projects in Jammu and Kashmir.
Nusaiba Khan is an architect and independent researcher from Srinagar.
