Weekly letter

The week in traffic — issue 14

Police Bazaar's morning rush is 11% better than last month. Here's what the data is showing us, and where we still need to do better.

Dr. Aibanshngain Kharkongor

Commissioner of Police (Traffic), Shillong · 28 Jul 2026, 11:44 am IST · 5 min read

Friends of Shillong,

This week, a small but real piece of good news: morning peak speeds on the Police Bazaar — Khyndai Lad corridor are 11% higher than the same week last month. That's not a forecast or a model — that's the average, segment by segment, drawn straight from the live engine that ShillongOne is built on.

Three things made the difference:

The Phase-1 footpath continuity work at Police Bazaar finally pulled the parked-on-footpath traffic out of the carriageway. It is hard to overstate how much one informal lane recovered changes a corridor.

The signal re-timing trial at Khyndai Lad — six extra seconds on the pedestrian phase, and a four-second cut from the longest-running approach — has reduced approach overflow at our worst quarter-hour.

VVIP movement coordination has tightened. Ten of the last fourteen advisories were posted to ShillongOne more than thirty minutes before the diversion. We owe it to citizens to keep that going.

Where we are still falling short: NH-6 (Madanrting → Nongmynsong) speeds remain volatile through the evening peak, driven mostly by goods-vehicle movement that doesn't always belong in those windows. We are coordinating with the Transport Department on a peak-hour goods restriction. I'll write more when we have a draft.

A small request: if you see a cleared incident on the live map that you don't think has actually been cleared, file a "verify" comment. We read every one. The map should never disagree with what you can see out your window.

Drive safely. And thank you for filing the eight thousand grievances we've answered this month — every one of them made the city a little better.

— Dr. Aibanshngain Kharkongor, Commissioner of Police (Traffic)

Posted 2d ago