When Charging Is Called Reform And Building Is Called Catch-Up
By Gajanan Khergamker
There is a curious asymmetry in how urban policy success is narrated. When New York decided to charge motorists USD nine to enter Manhattan’s central business district, the move was swiftly canonised as bold, evidence-based governance. Within months, official counts suggested that roughly 70,000 fewer vehicles were entering Manhattan each day, a reduction of about 10-12 percent in average weekday traffic volumes. Average speeds improved on key corridors. Noise complaints fell. The policy acquired a reputation for having “tackled congestion”.
At roughly the same time, Mumbai was absorbing one of the largest urban rail expansions attempted anywhere. Metro Lines 2A and 7 together now carry over three lakh passengers a day, with cumulative ridership crossing 200 million trips since opening. The Aqua Line, once fully operational, is projected to handle 13 to 14 lakh passengers daily, with official estimates suggesting it could replace 6.5 lakh vehicle trips every day across the North-South axis. These are not marginal shifts. They represent a structural reallocation of how the city moves.
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| Image for representational purpose only |
And yet, the language around the two interventions could not be more different. New York is said to have “disciplined” congestion. Mumbai is said to be “still clogged”. The disparity has little to do with outcomes and much to do with perception.
New York did not build new transport capacity to justify congestion pricing. It leaned on an existing subway system that already carries over three billion trips annually. The charge worked by rationing road space through a price signal. The impact was real, but geographically limited. Manhattan accounts for a fraction of the city’s total travel demand, and congestion outside the priced zone has shown mixed trends.
Mumbai’s strategy has been the inverse. It has attempted to create capacity before pricing scarcity. Metro corridors have added carrying capacity equivalent to several hundred full buses per hour per direction, operating on exclusive right-of-way. In peak periods along the Western suburbs, traffic police data and travel-time studies indicate corridor-level congestion reductions of 15 to 30 percent after Metro operations stabilised. These gains do not empty roads, they prevent collapse.
This distinction matters. Mumbai already moves over eight million suburban rail passengers daily, far more than most global cities move by Metro in total. Road congestion persists not because alternatives are unused, but because latent demand is immense. Every kilometre of new rail capacity is rapidly absorbed by commuters who would otherwise have had no viable option except the road.
Why, then, is New York framed as having solved a problem that Mumbai is still accused of failing to address?
One reason is the premium placed on price signals in global urban discourse. Charging money looks decisive. It produces a clean before-and-after headline, infrastructure does not. When a Western city charges drivers, it is read as political courage. When an Indian city spends years building tunnels, depots and viaducts, it is treated as administrative housekeeping.
Another reason lies in scale blindness. Manhattan sees around one million vehicle entries a day. A reduction of 70,000 is perceptible. Mumbai registers over three crore registered vehicles, with daily trips that dwarf Manhattan’s totals. A similar proportional shift disappears into the background noise of volume. The success is statistical, not theatrical.
There is also an ideological comfort in celebrating restraint over provision. Congestion pricing imposes visible discipline. It inconveniences a clearly defined group and signals moral seriousness about cars. Metro expansion works quietly. It allows millions to travel without confrontation. For the armchair activist, punishment photographs better than absorption.
What is rarely acknowledged is the counterfactual. Without the new Metro lines, Mumbai’s arterial roads would not merely be slow, they would be non-functional. The Metros have not eliminated congestion. They have arrested its growth, even as vehicle ownership continues to rise each year. That is not failure, it is containment.
Nor is Mumbai’s approach timid. Building capacity before pricing access is the harder political choice in a city where incomes vary wildly and mobility is directly tied to livelihood. New York could introduce a USD nine charge because credible alternatives already existed for most commuters. Mumbai has spent the last decade trying to make such alternatives real.
This is not an argument against congestion pricing in Indian cities. It will come, and it should. But to applaud pricing in isolation while dismissing capacity creation is to misunderstand how cities of unequal scale and income actually function.
New York priced scarcity and saw a modest, localised improvement. Mumbai attempted to manufacture capacity and quietly absorbed millions of trips that would otherwise have spilled onto the road. One lends itself to neat narratives. The other resists easy celebration.
If the same standards were applied honestly, Mumbai’s Metro programme would be discussed not as an unfinished remedy, but as one of the largest congestion-mitigation efforts underway anywhere. Its success lies not in empty roads, but in the traffic that never materialised because millions chose rail instead.
That absence is difficult to headline. But it is precisely where the real reform is hiding.
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