Let's solve for traffic

On a recent trip to India, I travelled to Bangalore and Delhi. India is my country of origin, so I am quite familiar with it and its roads. But still, on this visit, which I made after a covid induced hiatus, I was struck by the intensity of traffic I experienced. While there were no multi-hour logjams, thanks, perhaps, to good work of the traffic administrators in these cities. the sheer volume of traffic, i.e., the number of vehicles on the road, was startling. Both Delhi and Bangalore now have functional, modern, successful, much admired, mass frequented, and cheap (my one stop ride in Bangalore cost me Rs10 or 15 US cents) mass rapid transit (MRT) systems (Called “Metros” in India). But this don’t seem to have reduced the traffic on the roads. In fact, what was striking was the dense traffic running along the elevated MRT tracks.

As per the TomTom Traffic Index, Bangalore and Delhi rank 10th and 11th most congested metros in the world, with a congestion rating of 48%. This TomTom, which monitors traffic globally, through 600 million connected devices, explains, means that the average journey took 48% longer than it should have taken, presumably in no/low traffic conditions. TomTom also calculates that the average annual lost hours per commuter was 140 hours. I personally think that this is an underestimate as TomTom assumes that an average workday commute is 1 hour and done 260 days a year. This would translate to a 30-minute one way journey. In Delhi and Bangalore there are very few lucky persons whose daily commute (without traffic) is half an hour from their work workplaces. Also, few people have the luxury to spending their weekends entirely at home. I would increase TomTom’s estimate of hours lost safely by 50%.

Traffic is perhaps one of the biggest down drivers of quality of life in these cities. Old Bangalore, I can safely say, would be one of the most liveable cities on this planet but for its traffic. In my youth it had the moniker of being the “Garden City”. Even today, the roads of the older parts of Bangalore are graced by beautiful canopies of century-old trees. But the roads themselves are hellish. Built for a far, far smaller traffic and general population they are narrow and congested. Delhi, a more historic, more macho city is vibrant and confident, but its traffic is brutish and aggressive. And in my perception. the traffic is getting worse every year. These cities and their denizens seem to me be sitting like frogs in water slowly boiling.

Why this is happening is quite clear to see. This is an unfortunate by product of India’s success. The wonderful thing about India is the porosity of its society and its rapidly growing middle class. On this visit, I met my deceased mother-in-law’s former maid. She proudly showed me photographs of adult son and daughter. The son just got a job in a hotel after completing his studies in hotel management and the daughter completed her bachelors and is applying for her masters. It makes one proud to see such a generation-to-generation progress in India where an uneducated domestic maid’s children have clearly arrived in the Indian middle classes. And I can bet one of first things they will do is acquire their own person transportation vehicle – beginning with a two-wheeler and aspiring for a four-wheeler. This is a need and market which top industrialists vie to supply to. Ratan Tata, a stalwart Indian industrialist who leads the hallowed Indian industrial group of Tata’s, made it his personal mission to produce Nano, the worlds cheapest car at price of under (then $2,000). This time I read about the CEO of Mahindra’s, another Indian automobile giant, urging his team to come up with a car with an on the road price of Rs.150,000 (again under $2,000). While these ambitions are laudable on a personal level, on a societal level they are a nightmarish environmental disaster. The last thing India needs is more vehicles on the road, especially not these cheap, small, slow moving, poorly safety equipped ones.

The authorities bravely battle traffic working on new roads and flyovers, investing in better traffic management systems. But this is going to be as effective in the long term, as, to quote Baz Luhrman, “solving an algebra equation by chewing bubble-gum”. You can build all the flyovers and roads you want; the traffic is simply going to grow and fill them up. I have experienced this first hand in Delhi and Bangalore.

I think the first step to solve this problem, is to recognize how serious the problem is. Just because you can get through the day surviving it, doesn’t mean that is that is the way it should be. Traffic has costs in terms of lives and dollars. The road transport is one of the biggest, if the not biggest polluters in cities. Imagine if you reduced this pollution by 50%. EV’s are a long off in India, so all this traffic is burning fossil fuels. And the more time it spends on the road, the more fuel it burns. Traffic causes immense driver frustration, which leads to reckless driving. Lane driving is non-existent in India, two wheelers zip past from any side at any time. Traffic accidents in India abound. The cost of the loss of life cannot be measured but the loss of limbs and lives in traffic in India are grievously high. Some estimates reckon between 3% to 5% of India’s GDP is invested in traffic accidents. Traffic deaths annually exceed 125,000. The noise pollution by the incessant honking and noise of motor engines is omnipresent in Indian cities. You cannot escape it day or night, no matter where you are in the city. We need to solve for traffic. It’s not something which should be ignored.

I have a radical solution to propose for debate. The solution, I feel, is to promote and even enforce behavioural change. I draw my inspiration from the experience of India’s demonetization. This policy where the Indian government overnight took all currency denominations greater than Rs.100 (roughly $1.5) out of circulation. This caused much grief and pain, and economists are almost universal in their judgement that it did not achieve its objectives, which was to eliminate black money. But it did achieve one big behavioural change – it forced the adoption of digital payments. India today is a massive digital payments market. I watch with amazement how my eighty-year-old mother pays her bills on her mobile phone, something which I struggle with. Left with no choice people change behaviour and adapt. That’s what my mother did when the Indian Government left her with no other way to pay her bills during the period of demonetization when cash was simply not available. We need something similar in personal transportation.

Here is the idea. Get people to use these wonderful MRT/Metro systems more. Imagine a world where personal, private transportation was banned. Only commercial vehicles such as taxi’s, buses or delivery vehicles could ply the roads. People with exceptional or special or societally necessary needs could drive their vehicles with specially issued permits. In limited numbers, others who much-value their personal transportation vehicles would need to pay to use them to buy permits to travel at market driven prices. The revenue from these tolls would go to subsidise the MRT and its last mile systems. This will not be a very popular move. People love their personal space and the freedom their personal vehicles give. So, this move must be gradual, starting with one day or two a month. Maybe on holidays or weekends. And then expanding it slowly as people begin to see its societal benefits and accept their personal sacrifices as being for a greater cause and change their behaviour to use more of public transportation.

The above is a demand side solution. It won’t be enough. On its own, it will most certainly fail. To succeed, it must be supplemented by addressing the supply side. This would have two legs.

First, make public transportation free on such days. This can be funded by monies receive by those permits which were issued for private vehicles to ply on such days or simply by the cost the Government will save by improved public health (i.e. some book accounting). Singapore does this on global basis – before you buy a car you need a “Certificate of Entitlement” (CoE). These are a fixed number, and the market determines the price. When I lived in Singapore this could cost as much as S$100,000 nearly double the price of most cars. Then it also charges to enter congestion zones. Such kind of revenues should be used to make public transportation free.

Second, the last mile solution needs to be addressed. The Govt of India built these state-of-art MRT’s and then left the last mile to a chaotic market. As one descends from one of these elevated MRT/Metro Stations, one often feels as if one has left a first world country and entered a third world one. The MRT/Metro stations need to be linked to an extensive localised bus system. Buses in India need to be improved. Currently most of them seem like floating junks on the road. To me they seem to be the same buses I used in my university days in Delhi three decades or more ago.  The system also needs to sync with India’s numerous three-wheeler taxi’s by giving them bays, parking spaces, EV chargers (and converting them into EV for that matter) and driving a common/single/standard ticketing system. Traffic planners should think of the journey for the commuter from end to end.

I fully accept there will be many, many nay-sayers to this idea. But please show me another one which may work. Just don’t ignore this problem, like the frogs in a pan being slowly boiled ignoring the rising temperature of the water.