[libranof1987]

No chance of any metro being congestion free. As brilliant as the public transportation in Delhi is, the Metro along with last mile connectivity and app-based taxis, the infrastructure lags behind ground-reality by decades.

It is unrealistic to expect Delhi, any metro for that matter, to not be congested. Unless of course car ownership becomes is made so prohibitively expensive that there are barely any private cars on the road.

Originally Posted by am1m

Alternatively, of late, I've been thinking that maybe it's better to just let the situation keep getting worse. Right now it's still bearable to most of us living and commuting in cities like Bangalore and Delhi. We're ok with commute times touching 2 hours, ok with construction dust, ok with a lot of things. It needs to get really bad before we'll consider leaving these places and automatically making things better. Extreme thoughts, but these are extreme situations already.

Neither practical, nor realistic. The metros are what they are because of the access to basic needs: water, predominantly. If we leave metros, where do we go? I remember there were proposals many years ago to develop tier-2 cities so that the pressure on metros is eased; Indore and Mysore were prime contenders. Not a lot seems to have progressed. When metros in India lack 24-hour uninterrupted power and water supply, the situation in tier-2/3 cities is even dire.

We'll continue to spend money on making our cities "smart", accept the daily misery of spending hours in traffic, and go on until catastrophe strikes.