If all the vehicles of Delhi were placed bumper-to-bumper, they would occupy the entire length of the North-South and East-West corridors as well as the en Quadrilateral. That’s a length of 13,320 km.

If this staggering piece of statistics doesn’t boggle your mind, consider this: if Delhi’s registered vehicles are lined from the equator, the line could go beyond either of the poles. Or you could start the convoy from Delhi and get to Los Angeles, Cape Town, Sydney, Tokyo, Moscow, London or almost any part of the entire human-inhabited earth, except the southern half of south America. Given the way the number of vehicles are growing in Delhi, it won’t be long before the convoy gets there too.

Here, take another piece of statistics: the length of the convoy would be nearly equal to the combined lengths of the Nile and Amazon, the world’s two longest rivers.

The national capital is certainly the vehicle capital of the country. According to the Delhi government’s transport department, there were over 50 lakh — 50,36,842 to be precise — registered motor vehicles till the end of October this year.

Assume a conservative average length of about 3.5 metres for each car/jeep — a Maruti 800 is roughly 3.3 metres long — and Delhi’s 15.6 lakh registered four-wheelers alone would be enough to cover all but 400 km of the 5,846-km-long en Quadrilateral.

DID YOU KNOW?

If all of Delhi’s vehicles were lined up, the convoy would reach New York Delhi autos alone can cover 200 km.

The National Capital has a staggering number of vehicles. At a conservative average length of about 3.5 metres for each car/jeep, Delhi’s 15.6 lakh registered four-wheelers alone would be enough to cover all but 400 km of the 5,846-kmlong en Quadrilateral.

Add to this 32.1 lakh registered two-wheelers at an average of close to two metres in length each and you could cover those 400 km plus about 6,000 km of the 7,300-km-long North-South-East-West Corridor.

Then there are over 1.3 lakh goods vehicles of various kind — heavy, medium and light commercial vehicles — which would take care of over 900 km at an average of about seven metres per vehicle. Add to this the 43,000-odd buses at around nine metres each and you can cover the remaining 400 km of the corridor. We are still left with 74,000 autorickshaws, which would occupy a total length of close to 200 km, and 13,620 “other” vehicles, for which we can’t work out a length since it’s difficult to assign any average lengths to them.

So how does this massive stream of vehicles fit in Delhi? Quite easily, actually, since the total road network was 31,183 km in March this year, according to the Economic Survey of Delhi 2005-06. This distance, incidentally, is more than the distance between the two poles of the earth, approximately 20,000 km.

A caveat is in order. As the survey notes, the actual number of vehicles plying on Delhi’s roads is disputable. A large number of vehicles registered in Delhi can be seen plying on the roads of NCR towns. However, vehicles registered outside Delhi also ply on city roads. The NCT’s transport department is making efforts to estimate the actual number of vehicles in Delhi by taking into account vehicles that have outlived their life.

Source: http://epaper.timesofindia.com (Delhi Edition)
Date Of Publish: 26-Dec-06

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Nothing is fool-proof to a talented fool.

Strange...But not good sign for us...

Oh....God...plz save the Delhi from flood of Vehicles..

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"Rally Drivers Do It Sideways"

Government should prepare an immediate plan to control the vehicular population in the city.