Infrastructure in India: the path needed to take to decongest its roads

Building more roads often creates more traffic, not less. Cities that have successfully broken the congestion spiral offer compelling lessons

Every few months, Indian cities announce a new flyover, road widening, or expressway with the promise of “decongesting traffic”. Yet, for the daily commuter in metropolitan cities, congestion only worsens. The paradox is simple: Building more roads often creates more traffic, not less.

Vehicle ownership growth only compounds the problem. By 2024, India had nearly 260 million two-wheelers and 50 million cars. (HT Photo)

Economists Matthew Turner and Gilles Duranton termed this the “Fundamental Law of Road Congestion”: Vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) increase nearly in proportion to lane kilometres added. Meta-studies show elasticities of about 0.5 in the short run and 0.8 in the long run, which means a 10% increase in road capacity leads to nearly an 8% rise in traffic over time. This dynamic is also explained by the Braess Paradox, which shows that in complex networks, adding a new road can perversely worsen congestion because drivers’ individual route choices make the overall system less efficient. In the Indian context, the problem often manifests differently. When congestion is relieved at one junction through flyovers or traffic engineering, it merely shifts the bottleneck to the next signal or choke point, offering no respite to the long-distance commuter.

A NITI Aayog study estimated that just four metros — Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Kolkata — together lose ₹1.47 lakh crore ($22 billion) annually to congestion through wasted fuel, lost productivity, and health costs.

Vehicle ownership growth only compounds the problem. By 2024, India had nearly 260 million two-wheelers and 50 million cars. With such numbers, adding more asphalt simply induces more trips. We also need to stop treating roads as if they are consumer goods that can be endlessly produced; they are finite public spaces whose unchecked expansion comes at the cost of safety, equity, and liveability.

The consequences are not limited to wasted time. Congested, poorly managed urban roads amplify both accident risk and pollution exposure. To tackle congestion, India has invested heavily in metro rail networks. The Delhi Metro recently recorded 8.19 million daily journeys (August 2025), while Mumbai’s Metro Lines 2A and 7 hit a daily high of 295,000 riders in June 2025. These numbers prove that when high-quality public transport is available, citizens use it.

Yet metros by themselves have not reduced congestion. A curious psychology is at play. People assume that others will take the metro, easing road traffic. Ironically, this belief encourages many to buy or use private vehicles more freely, further adding to congestion. The result is not a modal shift away from cars and two-wheelers, but rather a net increase in traffic volumes alongside rising metro ridership.

This dynamic aligns with the Downs-Thomson Paradox, which states that the equilibrium speed of car traffic is determined by the quality of public transport. If public transport is poor, cars will dominate until their speeds slow to match transit. If transit improves but car use remains unrestricted, drivers assume others will switch, and continue to drive themselves, negating the gains. Turner and Duranton’s research shows that new transit attracts new riders but does not automatically cut road traffic unless paired with deliberate demand-management measures. For Indian cities, the lesson is clear: Transit expansion without restrictions on private vehicles risks doubling the system rather than balancing it.

Compounding this paradox is the chronic delay in executing mega-projects. Large flyovers, tunnels, and metro corridors frequently stretch over 10 to 20 years, forcing partial lane closures and detours that choke traffic for entire decades. Citizens thus endure daily gridlock in anticipation of relief that arrives only years later. The cost paid in wasted hours and reduced quality of life remains invisible in project budgets, yet it is perhaps the most significant of all.

Cities that have successfully broken the congestion spiral offer compelling lessons. Singapore has capped car ownership through its Certificate of Entitlement (COE) system, limiting the total vehicle fleet to under 950,000. With COE prices often exceeding 100,000 Singaporean dollars, car ownership is deliberately made scarce. Complementing this, the city-State’s Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) system has consistently reduced central business district traffic by 10-15%, helping maintain target speeds.

London introduced a congestion charge and later, the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), which lowered traffic volumes and cut harmful emissions by about 26% compared to business-as-usual. Nottingham (UK) pioneered the Workplace Parking Levy, raising over £108 million since 2012 to fund tram extensions, bus improvements, and station upgrades. Even in India, Delhi’s odd-even experiment — though imperfect — temporarily reduced traffic volumes by 15–20% and cut PM2.5 levels by up to 13% during enforcement hours.

The most effective strategies are, thus, pricing road use, imposing restrictions where necessary, and reinvesting revenues into public and non-motorised transport. The National Urban Transport Policy (2014) urges cities to plan for people rather than vehicles. The ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA) has also issued detailed guidance on non-motorised transport (NMT), urging cities to prioritise walking and cycling infrastructure. Yet ground realities diverge. For instance, Pune’s building regulations raised minimum residential parking requirements from 0 in 1982 to 1.65 per 100 m² in 2017 — a classic example of how norms inadvertently incentivise car ownership. Parking, often underpriced or free, worsens congestion by encouraging unnecessary trips and cruising for spots.

India must embrace a comprehensive package of reforms.

It must treat road space as a scarce commodity and price it accordingly. Piloting cordon or corridor pricing in central business districts or major IT corridors, with revenues ringfenced for buses, metros, and NMT, can both regulate demand and create a dedicated funding stream.

It must also scrap outdated minimum parking norms and introduce dynamic, paid kerbside parking — where revenues are transparently reinvested in local mobility improvements — to discourage unnecessary private vehicle use. Cities must enforce strict residential parking rules, ensuring that households without adequate parking space cannot purchase additional vehicles.

Dedicated continuous bus lanes with signal priority can double carrying capacity at a fraction of metro costs, providing fast, reliable, and affordable mobility for the majority of urban commuters. Buses and intermediate public transport must be integrated as feeders to metro systems. At the same time, high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes could be piloted on key corridors, allowing cars with at least four passengers to move faster while curbing the mindless use of single-occupancy cars that occupy disproportionate road space.

Implementing MoHUA’s NMT guidelines by building protected cycle corridors and universal footpaths will make short trips safer, healthier, and more attractive. Finally, Indian metros can learn from global best practices by experimenting with workplace parking levies. Introducing models in areas such as Gurugram, Bengaluru’s Outer Ring Road, or Mumbai’s Bandra Kurla Complex can generate steady revenues for feeder buses and station upgrades, while discouraging private car commuting. Together, these measures represent a coherent strategy to shift urban India away from gridlock and towards sustainable, people-centric mobility.

KH Govindaraj is additional chief secretary, department of urban development-2, government of Maharashtra, and Piyush Girgaonkar is a PhD scholar with the University of Lisbon, Portugal. The views expressed are personal