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This is a composite analysis of our reportage from across Indian cities since May 2025. Read the individual ground reports from the cities mentioned in this analysis, and a few more, in this series How India Moves.
Just about everywhere in Indian cities, the time it takes for people to travel to work or for leisure doubles between the off-peak and peak hours. What we often fail to realise is that congestion is not benign — it not only contributes to the toxic pollution in the air we breathe, but also takes a toll on our mental well-being. It is this human face of being stuck in traffic that should compel us to make a change.
Richie (name changed), a professional in the development sector in Delhi, commutes 30 km from Dwarka to South Delhi for work. He estimates that he loses 24 hours — a full day — every eight days to traffic congestion. That adds up to nearly two years lost to traffic, over the past 15 years of commuting to his workplace from Dwarka. This is despite Richie’s efforts to avoid peak traffic hours, which in Delhi typically run from 9 am to 12 noon and again from 6 pm to 9 pm.
Richie’s colleague Kiran, who also lives in Dwarka, prefers to take the metro. But it does not ease her commute much. To cover the last leg of her journey — 4.5 km from the metro station to office — she relies on autorickshaws, which take anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to cover the distance, depending on congestion.
This is a daily ordeal, which has a huge impact on our quality of life and mental health. We lose productive time stuck in traffic; we lose time with our families; and by the time we reach our destination, it feels as though we have come through a warzone.
The gridlock also means more pollution as vehicles stuck in traffic continue to burn fuel inefficiently, spewing harmful emissions into the atmosphere. This increases exposure to higher concentrations of toxic pollutants such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter, which are linked to respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular diseases and premature deaths. The 2018 emissions inventory studies by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a research institute headquartered in Delhi, along with Automotive Research Association of India in Pune and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), also in Pune, show that vehicles contribute about 40 per cent of the particulate load and 81 per cent of NOx emissions from all sources in Delhi.
Dynamic estimation of the changing contribution of sources during winter months by IITM shows that vehicles’ contribution can be more than 50 per cent of the daily overall pollution from local sources in Delhi. This indicates the potentially high impact of roadside exposure due to congestion on the health of Kiran, who says traffic conditions have barely improved over last 20 years, despite repeated government efforts to widen roads, build flyovers and expand the metro network.
An annual traffic index released by TomTom NV, a Dutch multinational developer of location technology, for 2024 shows that on average, a person living in urban India spends close to 94 hours a year for a 10 km one-way journey within the city centre, and 75.6 hours for the same journey in the metro region. Three Indian cities — Kolkata, Bengaluru and Pune — feature among the top five in the list of slowest cities in the world on the index, with modelled average travel time ranging between 33 and 35 minutes per 10 km.
To understand the patterns and triggers of congestion, Down To Earth (DTE) between May and June visited more than 40 cities across the country. For clarity, we have grouped them into three categories — mega and metro cities (with populations over 4 million), million-plus cities (with populations between 1 million and 4 million), and sub-million cities (with populations under 1 million) — and also analysed their mobility patterns over the past two decades.
This was not easy, primarily because our cities do not have official systems for collecting data related to trends in modal share (percentage of people using a particular mode of transport), travel demand, travel distances, traffic and journey speed and congestion impacts, among others. So, the documents considered for this assessment range from city mobility plans to independent research, and have been prepared in different years; in several cases, the information is old and not comparable. For instance, the data available for Delhi, Agartala and Surat are nearly 20 years old, while those for Bengaluru, Pune, Bhubaneswar, Chennai, Hyderabad, Shimla, Varanasi, Bhopal and Jaipur are 17 years old. Data for Kolkata is a quarter-century old. In Ahmedabad and Tiruchirappalli, data sets are not available to show dependence on different modes of transport.
However, together with our on-ground reportage, these documents offer a glimpse into how India’s cities move. Here are the key findings:
Across the cities, nearly half of the population still cycle or simply walk to work. In the national capital, 42 per cent people commute by cycling or walking; the figures are even higher in Mumbai (47 per cent) and Kolkata (48 per cent).
In fact, the share of non-motorised transport (NMT) — which includes walking and cycling — in overall urban transportation has increased over the past two decades across all cities visited by dte. Mega and metro cities have recorded the highest increase of 5 per cent. In million-plus cities, the NMT share has grown by 1.5 cent, while smaller (sub-million) cities show a 3.21 per cent rise.
In several million-plus and smaller cities, these low-cost modes of transport remain a critical backbone of mobility. They account for 54.5 per cent of travel in Varanasi, a pilgrimage town in Uttar Pradesh; 64 per cent in Madhya Pradesh’s Singrauli, known for its power plants; and 55 per cent in Visakhapatnam, the most populous city in Andhra Pradesh known for its ports and industries.
Walking is highly preferred in hilly and mountainous towns, such as Shimla (43 per cent), Gangtok (42.57 per cent) and Itanagar (32 per cent).
DTE’s interaction with residents reveal that walking and cycling are indispensable in regions where public transport is either patchy or is unaffordable, though at places people also choose to walk or cycle to avoid worsening congestion.
However, barring a few cities like Mysuru and Kochi, which have built dedicated infrastructure for walking and cycling and are encouraging residents to pedal short distances, roads in most cities are not designed to support these sustainable transport systems. Instead, they are choked with cars.
In the motorised transport segment, personal vehicles — two-wheelers and cars — dominate vehicle numbers on the road. Data with mParivahan portal, managed by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MORTH), shows that India registered 25.5 million vehicles in the financial year 2024-25. More than 88 per cent of these vehicles were for personal mobility.
This growth has been steep in mega and metro cities that have seen a 4.38 per cent rise in the use of private transport in the past two decades. The share of trips by car in these cities ranges from 3.6 per cent in Mumbai to 16 per cent in Jaipur, with the average hovering between 7 and 11 per cent. In Delhi, people’s reliance on cars can be gauged from the fact that the city added 187,000 cars in 2024-25, which translates to 513 cars a day.
However, much of the growth that mega and metro cities registered in private transport is fuelled by two-wheelers, which have seen a 4.13 per cent increase over the past two decades and now dominate private motorised travel in cities such as Bengaluru (27.1 per cent), Chennai (29.6 per cent) and Hyderabad (29 per cent).
This trend intensifies in million-plus cities, where the share of trips by two-wheelers often exceeds 30 per cent — reaching as high as 43 per cent in Dehradun, 40 per cent in Thiruvananthapuram and 39 per cent in Kochi. The share of trips by cars in these cities typically range between 5 per cent and 28 per cent.
Smaller, sub-million cities present a surprising picture. As in million-plus cities, the growth of private transport in smaller cities has been modest—but not because of two-wheelers. Over the past two decades, the reliance on two-wheelers in smaller cities has dropped significantly by 4 per cent, while car dependence has increased by over 5 per cent.
Among the cities assessed, Gangtok, the capital city of mountainous state Sikkim, has the highest share of car trips at 54 per cent, followed by Meghalaya’s Shillong (25 per cent) and Rishikesh (24 per cent).
A high car usage, however, does not necessarily reflect rising affluence. Instead, they suggest that as incomes grow and infrastructure develops, smaller cities are leapfrogging into car-based travel, bypassing the two-wheeler phase to some extent. As becomes evident from DTE’s reportage, such high reliance on cars also indicates the limited reach and unaffordability of public transport due to high inter-change costs and waiting time.
This reality is especially evident in hilly and mountainous towns, where car use is notably higher than in cities on the plains, largely because public transport fails to connect scattered and remote settlements.
A combination of public transport services, from buses to metro to suburban rail to waterways, depending on the size of the city, should thus be central to urban mobility. This has to be at the core of city’s mobility to make them liveable and people-centred, with cleaner air, less congestions, less noise and more green spaces.
We have analysed the trips made using public transport in India’s six mega cities. Compared to smaller cities, the availability and usage of formal public transport is much higher in mega and some metropolitan cities. The dependence is 14 per cent of all the trips made in Hyderabad, 23.5 per cent in Delhi-NCR, 28 per cent in Chennai, 31.7 per cent in Mumbai and 32 per cent in Bengaluru.
Kolkata leads the mega cities with 36.8 per cent dependence on public transport. But this mode of mass commuting, that contributes to lower emissions and requires less road space per passenger compared to private vehicles, is buckling under pressure.
Mega and metro cities report an average 5.69 per cent decline in bus trip share. Despite significant investments, metro systems have resulted in only a marginal shift of 0.81 per cent and modest growth in suburban rail. Million-plus cities have also seen modest public transport growth (by 0.74 per cent), with a few outliers like Srinagar where bus usage is as high as 64 per cent.
Our ground reportage shows that the city has achieved this feat by focusing on vehicle restraint measures, which include converting commercial streets into pedestrian-only zones, regulating parking on public roads and boosting public bus services.
Sub-million cities have surprisingly seen a 4.03 per cent increase in public transport, though the absolute shares vary widely. For instance, Shimla reports 49 per cent bus use, while in cities like Singrauli and Rishikesh, public transport barely scratches 2-12 per cent. This decline points to a loss of commuter confidence in reliability and accessibility of public transport as private modes become more accessible, appealing and offer door-to-door convenience.
People’s reliance on public transport drops to bare minimum in hilly and mountainous towns. In Gangtok, which has the highest car usage at 54 per cent, people’s dependence on buses is just 0.71 per cent. The presence of public transport is absolutely nil in Silchar, barring a handful of buses that connect the second largest city in Assam to its neighbouring cities and states. In Kohima, people depend on buses for just 1.20 per cent of their trips. Here the problem stems from inadequate public transport coverage, as is evident from dte’s reportage.
To fill the gaps in formal public transportation, informal public transport (IPT), which includes shared autos, e-rickshaws and informal minibuses, is increasingly taking over urban mobility. Data shows that IPT’s share has grown substantially over the past two decades: By 5.98 per cent in million-plus cities and by 3.4 per cent in smaller cities.
In contrast, mega and metro cities have seen only a 0.89 per cent increase. This suggests that at places, where investments in buses lag, IPT becomes a lifeline, often surpassing formal public transport in terms of modal share. For instance, in cities like Patna, Ranchi and Varanasi, where bus services and other public transport systems are in disrepair, residents rely heavily on shared autos, e-rickshaws and informal minibuses.
In Patna, IPT accounts for 26 per cent of the modal share, compared to 21 per cent for formal public transport. In Ranchi and Varanasi, where public transport facilitates just 5 per cent and 4 per cent of the total trips, IPT makes up 29 per cent and 22 per cent of the modal share.
There is no doubt that IPT sustains mobility for the urban poor and the middle class, addresses last-mile connectivity and offers flexible transport options where structured services are weak. However, its unplanned and unregulated growth, which is not aligned with a city’s formal public transport system, contributes to congestion and safety risks.
This cycle of growing dependence on private vehicles and IPT and the consequent congestion and emissions, gets reinforced with longer and more frequent trips. This can be seen in cities experiencing peripheral expansion.
In mega and metro cities that show rapid outward expansion, a person now makes 11.5 per cent more trips per day than what they used to make 15 to 20 years ago; average trip length has also increased by 9.4 per cent. Delhi, for example, has seen average trip lengths surge by over 80 per cent — from 6 km to nearly 11 km — highlighting housing shifts to city edges. This pattern reflects increasing travel demand, and often pushes people towards private vehicle use.
In million-plus cities, people are making 5.3 per cent more trips, and average trip lengths have grown by 13 per cent. These cities are showing early signs of sprawl, decentralisation, and growing pressure on transport systems. For instance, average trip lengths in Dehradun has increased by 10 per cent, nearing 9 km. In Indore and Kochi, the increase in trip lengths exceeds 30 per cent. These figures signal emerging peripheral zone, longer commutes and expanding urban footprints. In fact, some million-plus cities are beginning to mirror the long-commute patterns already seen in metro areas.
In smaller towns, trips are still relatively short but growing in length. While trip rates have increased marginally (by 0.4 per cent), average trip lengths have risen by over 11 per cent — indicating the early stages of urban sprawl.
The breathtaking landscapes of Meghalaya’s capital city Shillong are increasingly burdened by traffic congestion. On a typical day, vehicles move at 25 km per hour on the winding narrow roads of the city; the speed reduces to 17.4 km per hour during the peak traffic, suggest estimates by TomTom NV for August 2024. Estimates show that Shillong depends on cars for a quarter of its transport.
Jaipur, where trips by cars account for 16 per cent of the total urban transport, traffic speed drops from 36.7 km per hour in off-peak hours to 19 km per hour during the peak traffic. In Delhi-ncr, where 11.5 per cent of trips are by car, peak-hour speeds drop from 37 km per hour to 24.6 km per hour, resulting in a 30.86 per cent congestion level, shows data provided by TomTom NV.
But the congestion crisis is not as straight forward. Though cities with high car and two-wheeler dependence typically experience greater peak-hour slowdowns, several other factors, such as tourism, city size, floating populations and the combined stress of growing reliance on private vehicles and infrastructure limitation, can intensify congestion.
In Shillong, residents blame the congestion on the city’s increasing reliance on cars in the absence of adequate public transport. Bengaluru has a lower car share (7 per cent) and high two-wheeler dependence (27 per cent). Yet, shows the TomTom NV data for August 2024, it faces one of the worst congestion levels — at 40.73 per cent — with peak-hour speeds dropping to just 17.5 km per hour from 32.4 km per hour. This highlights how two-wheelers, too, contribute significantly to urban gridlock.
Chennai also has 7 per cent car share, but records severe congestion at 40.26 per cent, driven by suburban sprawl and growing private vehicle use. Kolkata, despite a low car trip share (5.3 per cent), still experiences high congestion (38.97 per cent), which appears due to high reliance on road-based transport and limited road space, underscoring that congestion is also shaped by city design and public transport quality. In Rishikesh, residents rely on cars for 24 per cent trips and the city sees a congestion of nearly 24.6 per cent. Congestion becomes severe in certain months due to religious tourism-related influxes.
However, our analysis of the August 2024 congestion data obtained from TomTom NV for the 40 cities shows that the average congestion index is highest for mega and metro cities (at 39.05 per cent), followed by million-plus cities (34.63 per cent) and smaller cities (28.47 per cent). The trend is clear: higher use of cars and two-wheelers, longer commutes and weak public transport lead directly to increased congestion.
To escape this gridlock, most cities are widening roads, building more roads and flyovers and digging underpasses. This way we cannot win the battle of congestion. Delhi-ncr is a classic example of this. In the city, which is spread over 1,400 sq km, roads occupy 23 per cent of the land—the highest in the country. Yet, the national capital is one of the worst congested cities in the country. By comparison, Kolkata and Mumbai with limited land and road space have higher share of public transport usage even though these cities are facing congestion pressures.
Mountainous cities like Gangtok, Aizawl and Shillong, with huge land constraints have also taken the lead to ease congestion levels by controlling car ownership through measures like “Proof of Parking” certificate rules that requires buyers to first establish that they have space to park the vehicle.
The fact is, to support sustainable travel and to improve public health and liveability of cities, alternatives to private vehicle usage needs to be upscaled significantly. So, cities need to urgently scale up public transport systems and services with a special focus on buses, and integrate all transport systems for seamless journey and lower journey costs. They must strengthen feeder systems, and last mile connectivity while ensuring safe walking and cycling access, and reorganise ipt to connect door steps with public transport and major destinations.
Since trip distances are increasing across city categories, with mega cities seeing over 80 per cent increase in commute lengths, urban planning has to keep jobs, homes and services within walking or short transit distance, especially near emerging peripheries and transit nodes. Mixed income housing near transit lines need to allow urban poor to have equitable access.
Despite the growing travel distances, a substantial number of daily trip lengths still fall within 5 km distance in cities, and this is an opportunity to design more walkable, cyclable and public-transport friendly streets. For instance, data with Census 2011 shows that in Kolkata, 56 per cent of the trips are made within 5 km; 48 per cent in Delhi, 44.4 per cent in Mumbai, and 47 per cent in Bengaluru and Chennai.
Along with upscaling of public transport infrastructure, it is necessary to restrain personal vehicle usage with parking management, variable parking pricing, congestion and road pricing, and policy reforms to recover the true cost of vehicle ownership to intercept the worsening congestion trends early. At the same time, cities must focus on ambitious pathways such as zero-emissions vehicles and electrification of vehicles. Creating low-emissions zones with expanded walking and cycling networks and intensified public transport services is critical.
Such massive transformation will need sustainable financing of urban transport infrastructure. While augmenting budgetary resources, cities can adopt innovative financing options like land value capture, polluter pays principles, and climate funds to supplement resources. This will have to be customised for different city classes.
Since data gaps severely constrain mobility planning in India, with many cities relying on outdated or incomplete information, each intervention, be it public transport expansion, nmt infrastructure, or vehicle restraint measure, all must have clear targets, mandate, and measurable indicators to align with service level benchmarks. As the National Urban Transport Policy states, cities must be designed for people, not for cars.