Long queues to refill vehicles with fuel spilled aggressively onto Hyderabad’s main roads by Wednesday (March 25, 2026) morning, turning key stretches into bottlenecks and forcing traffic police into continuous on-ground regulation to keep the city moving.
As vehicles crowded around petrol pumps and extended onto carriageways, peak-hour traffic slowed sharply across several junctions. The police personnel worked to compress the swelling lines into single-file or two-line queues, attempting to carve out space for traffic even as the volume continued to build.
Also read: Fuel crisis LIVE updates
The impact was most visible along the Old Mumbai Highway in Raidurgam, a crucial IT corridor that handles heavy office-hour traffic. The stretch from the Cyberabad Commissionerate office towards Care Hospitals near the Biodiversity Park junction resembled a parking lot rather than a moving roadway. Service lanes were completely saturated, while two to three lanes on the main carriageway were taken over by vehicles waiting to refuel, leaving only narrow gaps for moving traffic.
According to Raidurgam Traffic Inspector Pavan Mayasa, the situation began deteriorating late Tuesday night, particularly along the Lemon Tree stretch, where queues extended up to the IKEA underpass as well as near the Gachibowli U-turn towards Indira Nagar. Despite attempts by the traffic personnel to temporarily halt operations at some pumps to ease congestion, resistance from both customers and fuel station operators meant the queues continued to grow.
