Pune's Old City Moves at Half the Speed of Its New Roads - Here's the Data

Two numbers that describe the same city

15 kilometres per hour. That's the average speed on Shivaji Road, according to Pune's own Adaptive Traffic Management System (ATMS), which tracked 125 junctions across 16 corridors citywide. Tilak Road isn't much better at roughly 16.5 kmph. Bajirao Road comes in at 18.6.

Now the other number: 32.4 kilometres per hour, the average on Airport Road — the fastest corridor the study measured. Nagar Road isn't far behind at 31.7.

Same city, same hour of the day, more than double the speed depending on which road you're on. The old Peths — Shivaji Road, Tilak Road, Bajirao Road, the dense commercial core around Rasta Peth — move at scooter-in-a-parking-lot pace. The newer, wider corridors built for a different era of traffic move more than twice as fast.

Why the old city crawls

Pune's own Additional Commissioner of Police, Manoj Patil, pointed to the obvious culprits when the ATMS numbers came out: dense commercial activity, narrow road width, frequent signal interruptions. None of that is a fixable-by-Tuesday problem. You can't widen Tilak Road without demolishing the shops lining it. You can't thin out the commercial density of Rasta Peth without changing what the neighbourhood is. The ATMS report flagged Goodluck Chowk, Modern College, and Seva Sadan as particular pressure points, worst during the 9 am to noon and 5 to 8 pm windows — which is to say, worst exactly when everyone actually needs to get somewhere.

Citywide, the picture isn't much better once you zoom out: an average speed of 21.4 kmph on a representative Thursday in early July, with police expecting it to drop to around 17 kmph once evening rush and monsoon rain combine. That's the city overall. The old core is dragging the whole average down.

Pune is now paying two separate teams to explain its own traffic to itself

Here's the part that tells you how much this still isn't understood, even with ATMS already running: PMC has brought on Ernst & Young for a three-year, ₹7.11 crore study pulling in TomTom data, telecom location data, CCTV feeds, the Pune Urban App, and GPS data straight from public transport vehicles. Separately, as of this October, IIM Mumbai has agreed to run its own comprehensive study of traffic management and transport infrastructure across the whole Pune Metropolitan Region.

Two institutions, two budgets, both trying to answer a question the city already has a very blunt answer to: the old core moves at walking-adjacent speed and the newer roads don't. What the expensive studies are actually for is the harder question — which signal timing, which lane reconfiguration, which one-way flip might shave a few kmph off Shivaji Road without requiring anyone to tear down a shopfront.

What this means if you're the one stuck on Bajirao Road

Nobody commuting through the Peths today is waiting on a three-year study to finish. A 15 kmph crawl through Shivaji Road is exactly the kind of trip where the car itself is the bottleneck, not the traffic — three people in one vehicle inch through the same jam a single driver would have sat through alone, at a third of the per-person aggravation. For short hops through the parts of Pune that were never going to move fast no matter which consultancy studies them next, sharing the ride is the only lever that's actually available before 2029.