TomTom published its traffic index for the year of 2019 a few days ago, revealing the sorry state of Mumbai traffic. Thankfully, Mumbai didn’t take the crown for the most congested city in the world, leaving that to fellow Indian metropolitan city Bengaluru.
It is said that Mumbaikars experienced the heaviest traffic jam on the 9th of September, 2019 while Pune saw its worst traffic on the 2nd of August, the TomTom report added.
Diving deeper into the numbers, it is revealed that an average Mumbaikar spends around 8 days and 17 hours more per year in a vehicle given the amount of congestion and traffic abruptions the city goes through on a regular basis. Meanwhile, in Pune, motorists reportedly spend 8 days and 1 hour in traffic annually.
Transportation expert Bina Balkrishnan recommends building residential and commercial buildings as well as educational institutions close to each other to avoid the overall commute time.
On the other hand, transport expert Ashok Datar mentions that citizens need to ditch their private vehicles and start using public transport in order to avoid congestion. He also suggested that vehicles on the roads have increased while roads haven’t changed too much.
It is shown that travelling in Mumbai after 8 PM on Fridays for a 30-minute commute can save up to 4 hours per year, while the same metric when applied to Pune can help motorists save up to 5 hours in a year.
Headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands, TomTom is considered a pioneer in the field of location technology and has long been used on cars and other automobiles as a means of navigation.
Elaborating on how the data is collected, TomTom’s Strategic Business Development Manager, Vinod Kumar P said, “We get the data from multiple sources across the globe and in every few seconds, we get updates from nearly 600 million devices.”
While there aren’t enough roads in the city to tackle the growing number of vehicles running on the roads, citizens remain concerned about the state of existing roads. Several potholes in the city have either injured or killed motorists leading a vocal public call for strict action. The BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation) has recently announced that it will start penalizing contractors if potholes are found on the streets/roads constructed by them while also pitching the possibility of withholding their ongoing projects.
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