SHIVANI SINGH

Has the sea of idling vehicles on Delhi’s roads started to look like an ocean lately? Has the waiting time at every intersection stretched to two or more signal cycles? As we spent more and more time trapped behind the wheel last year, statisticians have revealed some scary facts about Delhi’s traffic.

The government data released last week showed that the number of vehicles registered in Delhi increased from 8.8 million in 2014-15 to 9.7 million in 2015-16 — a spike of 9.93% and the highest in eight years.

On December 15, HT wrote about a study by six road design experts stating that the time spent by Delhi commuters on city roads has doubled in the last six years and the speed of traffic during peak hours has been cut by half. Today, a person travelling 40km by a private vehicle during peak hours spends an average of 3.43 hours on the road, up from 1.36 hours in 2011, the researchers found.

This ocean of vehicles hasn’t just choked the roads. It is asphyxiating the national capital. In 2015, as many as 6,502 persons died of respiratory diseases, the second biggest cause of death after the unspecified “others” category in government records.

Didn’t we see it coming? Yes, we did. And we looked away.

Fighting congestion is not about convenience. “It is a fight to ensure the city can fulfil its most basic function of bringing people together,” wrote Harvard economist Edward Glaeser in his book “Triumph of the City”. But for Delhi, getting an efficient public transport has always been low on priority.

Mumbai’s suburban rail that dates to 1853 is as old as