'7 minutes journey took one-and-a-half hour': Gurugram rains leave commuters stranded for hours

Tuesday evening turned into another long traffic ordeal for Gurgaon commuters as showers, waterlogging, peak-hour rush and Kanwar Yatra diversions brought movement to a crawl across major road stretches. According to Times of India, commuters were stranded for nearly three hours on the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway, the Gurgaon-Sohna highway and the choked Ambience Mall underpass.

Waterlogging worsens the jam

Traffic police said waterlogging in several parts of the city and on the Delhi side of the expressway near the Dwarka tunnel disrupted flow and triggered a cascading gridlock.

Commuters said congestion had already started building before the evening rain, with vehicles taking more than 30 minutes to negotiate the Ambience Mall underpass because of Kanwar Yatra diversions.

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Commuters describe ordeal

Rashi Bhakhri, an employee at a multinational company, said, “I left my office at DLF Cyber Park around 5 pm and reached the Ambience Mall underpass in five minutes. That’s where the nightmare began.”

“It took exactly two hours just to get out of the waterlogged underpass. There was nowhere to move, there was no phone network inside and rainwater kept dripping onto vehicles from above. Even after exiting, it took another 20 minutes to cross the DLF Downtown stretch, which is hardly 100 metres away. I finally reached home after three hours,” she added.

Another commuter, Smriti Chauhan, said her “office shuttle usually takes five to seven minutes from Atlas Chowk to DLF Cyber Park, but it took one and a half hours on Tuesday to cover the same distance. The entire stretch was a sea of red, completely choked as vehicles simply did not move.”

Shivani, a resident of Sector 56, said every spell of rain exposed the city’s poor drainage and traffic management. “Today, it took me an hour to reach Shankar Chowk from my office in Udyog Vihar Phase 3. It’s normally a five-minute drive. Traffic moves at a snail’s pace. Things became normal only after I crossed Shankar Chowk and headed towards Golf Course Road,” she said.

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Fares rise, cops struggle

The gridlock also pushed app-based cab fares sharply higher, with commuters sharing screenshots of a Udyog Vihar-to-Dwarka Sector 1 ride jumping from about ₹ 350 to nearly ₹ 1,300. By late evening, queues at IFFCO Chowk stretched long, and an ambulance was among the vehicles stranded as traffic personnel tried to clear the carriageway.

Traffic police said bottlenecks were caused by waterlogging at Udyog Vihar, Dhundahera, Kapashera, Old Delhi-Gurgaon Road and MG Road, along with spillover from the Delhi side of the expressway. A senior traffic police officer said, “Waterlogging near the Dwarka tunnel on both sides of the expressway caused traffic to pile up. Since there was waterlogging in several parts of Gurgaon, traffic movement was severely affected across these stretches.”