India, May 24 -- On paper, Delhi's 47-kilometre-long Outer Ring Road is a major arterial route designed to streamline urban mobility, connecting sprawling residential pockets to the city's economic and administrative centres. In practice, it has become a congested corridor of frustration-plagued by poor design, ill-placed signage, chaotic merging, and an alarmingly high number of road crashes.

Its size should be an advantage. But infrastructure on the stretch has failed to evolve with the capital's rising traffic load. According to traffic engineering experts, the problem lies less in space constraints and more in the absence of fundamental safety and design interventions.

S Velmurugan, chief scientist and head of the traffic engineerin...