Commuters employ the KBR one-way and ponder the need for flyovers
From the side of the busy junction where Highway No. 82 meets Highway No. 92, a steady flow of vehicles can be seen pouring in from both roads and proceeding towards Jubilee Hills Checkpost and onward to Highway No. 45.
Every hour during the morning and evening rush hours, thousands of vehicles pass through the intersection – most of them cars and a few bicycles, supplemented by the occasional city bus.
At about 6 pm on a weekday, the intersection is full but not crowded. Vehicles continue to move, albeit at a moderate speed, as the Hyderabad traffic police issue instructions through a megaphone from an elevated post on the Film Nagar side.
“Commuting has been seamless since the introduction of the one-way on August 18. Before the one-way, it would have taken me half an hour to travel from the Cancer Hospital to Road No. 45. Now it takes five minutes,” says Mohammed Shaheer Zaman, a regular commuter on the road.
The traffic police has ordered one-way traffic on the road around the KBR National Park to facilitate the construction of graders under the Hyderabad City Innovative and Transformative Infrastructure (H-CITI) project. Work has begun on a total of seven flyovers and seven underpasses at a cost of over ₹1,000 crore, even as a Public Interest Litigation is pending in the Supreme Court regarding the consolidation of an eco-zone around the park.
While the first day of the one-way was chaotic, travel surprisingly calmed down as commuters got used to the directions. The two bottlenecks on the route were the ongoing H-CITI works that saw huge trenches dug in the middle of the road and on the other side where vehicles crossed to reach their destination.
Traffic on the KBR highway. File | Photo credit: Special arrangement
“The improvement in traffic flow is amazing and phenomenal. It has become so smooth without any change in the earlier road systems. The only change has been the re-orientation of the vehicle flow itself. It smacks of the government’s insistence on a project involving time, money and frustrated commuters,” says Aasheesh Pittie, a bird and nature lover.
The route is shown completely blue on Google Maps most of the day, indicating smooth traffic. At peak, blue is replaced by orange only in places where H-CITI works are in progress. Another advantage of a one-way road is the elimination of frequent turns that slowed down traffic.
“Traffic now flows more smoothly than before. There is no need for a flyover if one road is permanent, but the public will complain about the longer distance and fuel consumption,” said a traffic policeman manning vehicles on the road, on condition of anonymity.
“Back in 2017, I proposed a one-way road to protect the trees on the KBR pavement which were marked for felling. Later, they spared the pavement trees and proposed to acquire properties on the other side. The project is a huge waste of public resources compared to a simple repair of the one-way road,” says Uday Krishna Peddireddi of the Vata Foundation.
His concept now seems to be resonating with the public. Mr Shaheer says his commute time has been cut to a third of what it was before the flyover work began. The only hitch is fuel consumption and higher car prices. Social media platforms are full of praise for this experiment.
“Some critics are spreading fake news about the traffic jam on the one-way route. In reality, traffic is moving smoothly, with only a slight slowdown in some left turns,” wrote X Bollaboina user Manish Yadav.
“This temporary one-way setup has solved the traffic congestion that raises the question of whether flyovers and underpasses are a requirement or not,” wrote another user Ravinder Chepuri.
One other user, drawing on the KBR experiment, proposed a single route on the Cyber Towers flyover towards the IKEA underpass for traffic towards Knowledge City-Biodiversity Junction, during peak hours.
“The government needs to reverse the mega-infrastructure project in light of the success of the one-way transport system. They need to backfill the roads that have been dug up and concrete them to connect them to the roads on both sides. That will add at least one more lane for traffic flow,” says Mr Pittie.
Published – 29 Aug 2026 08:26 IST