Providing traffic and transport advice for a new business park in Chennai

In 2018, DLF was masterplanning for a large business park on Taramani Road, located off the main IT corridor in the southern Indian city of Chennai.

Steer was commissioned by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill India Private Limited (SOM) to support DLF in the masterplanning process by providing advice on all traffic and transport-related aspects of the development, primarily with a view to mitigating potential traffic issues.

Steer’s support included demand estimates, strategies and schematic design for access/circulation, staging, parking, and pick-up/drop-offs – with the objective of providing a seamless, safe and multimodal travel experience for users.

Given the dearth of publicly available databases on traffic conditions, we used data from the similarly sized DLF ‘Cyber City’ – a business park in Manapakkam located about 13 km west of site – to estimate potential demand and travel behaviour at the upcoming development. We used a combination of local knowledge and international expertise to provide evidence-based advice.

Our inputs enabled SOM and their other supporting consultants (e.g. vertical transport consultants) to design all elements of the transport infrastructure to accommodate the daily peaks in demand that a development of this size will experience.

Successes and outcomes

Chennai has one of the largest shares of two-wheelers in the country, along with high modal shares for public transport. Using a local benchmark helped in estimating reasonable modal splits and hourly profiles of vehicles and pedestrians estimated to enter and exit the site. This included scenario analyses for modal shifts away from cars when using a high-quality centralised shared transport service.

Therefore, our advice will potentially mitigate additional congestion and provide a sustainable solution for a development estimated to cater for more than at least 75,000 daily users.