Kothrud Has Two Highways Running Through It. Neither One Is Enough.

Kothrud has an unusual problem for a Pune neighbourhood: it isn't short on arterial roads. Karve Road and Paud Road both run through it, both wide, both officially classified as national highways, and between them they carry almost everything Kothrud generates or receives. The problem isn't a missing road. It's that two highways' worth of traffic still isn't enough capacity for what Kothrud has become.

Karve Road is congested through most of the day, not just at rush hour, and the backup around Nal Stop - where several of the area's main roads converge - is bad enough that regular commuters plan around it rather than through it. Paud Road carries its own share, running west out toward Bavdhan, and junction queues there build the same way during peak hours.

One side of this has actually been addressed. The Chandani Chowk interchange, long a chokepoint on the way toward the Mumbai-Bengaluru highway, is complete now, and traffic headed that way from Kothrud moves noticeably better than it used to. That's the rare case of a Pune infrastructure project actually finishing and doing what it was built to do.

Paud Road hasn't gotten its equivalent yet. The proposed Pashan-Panchavati-Kothrud tunnel is meant to pull through-traffic off Paud Road the same way Chandani Chowk's interchange pulled it off Karve Road - but a tunnel is a fundamentally bigger, slower build than a surface interchange, and it's still a proposal, not a project with a groundbreaking date attached. Until it exists, Paud Road keeps absorbing the traffic a tunnel is supposed to someday take off it.

What's worth noticing here is how differently the two fixes land. An interchange is something you build once and the capacity's just there, permanently, for every car that uses it afterward. It doesn't scale down when fewer people need it and it doesn't help at all until the day it opens. A parcel or a rider sharing a trip down Paud Road today isn't waiting on a construction timeline to make a difference - it's one less car in the queue at Nal Stop this afternoon, regardless of what gets tunnelled through the hill a few years from now.

Kothrud's own geography makes that math more useful than usual, too - a lot of the traffic on both roads isn't passing through, it's local people making local trips, the kind that are genuinely easy to share if two neighbours are headed the same direction at the same time. The interchange took years. A shared ride down Paud Road takes as long as it takes to ask.