A popular cliché that relates with Mumbaikars is that working professionals spend almost a quarter of their life commuting through the crowded local trains/buses.
Indeed, Mumbai is unique. Unique in the sense that – every morning there are over 10 million train commuters and bus passengers making interminable trips to offices mostly located in the South Mumbai. Eeh!… Not to forget about the return journey for the same herd towards the other pole, at dusk of the day.
Thankfully, the other side of Mumbai, the Vashi-Panvel zone, is developing by leaps and bounds and is acting fruitfully in cutting the commuting time and diverting traffic, at least partially – for a target group of people working across the belt. However, Mumbaikars still spend maximum time commuting, over their counterparts in other major metros, thanks to the massive traffic hurdles in the city.
Having said that, long-distance commuting is still the norm with as much as 26% public in India still travelling over 90 minutes everyday. Moreover, a survey points out that the average commuting length in India is 29 minutes, but a minority 12% of commuters travel more than an hour, up and down, which afflicts pain and an unproductive wastage of time.
In India, only 67% of the respondents owning a car asserted at driving to work. In my opinion, this could be on account of major traffic snarls (if you are on twitter I am sure you heard the word “traffucked”) during the peak morning and evening evening; not to mention the woes of car parking and related costs. Globally, cars are most popular form of commuter transport.
The solution to problem of longer commuting hours certainly lies in easing of traffic snarls powered by well-designed infrastructural facilities, including multi-level car parking slots for the private vehicles.
In fact, speedy execution of ongoing projects related to roads and over-bridges could in itself serve the redressal to these traffic congestion issues. Announcements related to building of Flyovers provide visible symbols of achievement, and the government in power doesn’t want to be left behind in a want to score a brownie point in terms of project implementation – but, what about the executing them?
One can easily determine the above political drama – once stuck in the narrow streets of a metro city, clogged by traffic nightmares, over where one end of the road stays dug by local authorities while on the other side heavy construction related to the building of flyovers take place.
Aware about these unavoidable circumstances, most of the IT and call-centre companies situated in Mumbai are shifting their locations to distant suburbs such as Powai, Vashi and Thane among others, in a bid to come closer to the residence areas of the employees to save time, money and efforts involved in ferrying them, to and fro, from the office premises. Additionally, it also saves the company from the payment of exorbitantly high rental or acquisition costs involved in dealing with expensive commercial property prices in prime business locations.
So what about you ? How time do you spend traveling every day ?