Staggered Work Hours May Help Beat Traffic

Changing work schedules and introducing flexi-work hours are low-cost efforts that could reduce peak-hour congestion

- Amit Kumar Jain, Surbhi Jain

The demand for travel in any urban centre is characterised by a wide temporal variation during the day. This leads to a very high demand for travel in mornings and evenings — the peak hours around the start and end of office hours — causing acute traffic congestion. It has been estimated that vehicles in major metropolitan cities account for 70 per cent of carbon monoxide (CO), 50 per cent of hydrocarbon (HC), 30-40 per cent of nitrogen oxides (NOx), 30 per cent of suspended particulate matter (SPM) and 10 per cent of sulphur dioxide (SO2) of the total pollution load of these cities — two-third of this is contributed by two wheelers alone.

As per a report titled Unlocking Cities-the impact of ridesharing across India released by the Boston Consulting Group in April 2018, on an average, travellers in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Kolkata spend 1.5 hours more on their daily commutes than their counterparts in other Asian cities during peak traffic times, which results into a loss of around $22 billion annually to traffic congestion on account of the fuel burned, productivity loss, air pollution and accidents.

Demand and supply

The conventional approach to address traffic congestion is building more roads, flyovers, underpasses and widening of roads to augment the availability of space for smooth movement of vehicles. However, the efficacy of these supply-side solutions is limited by the existing capacity of the system, as creation of additional capacity involves huge capital investment and time. For instance, beyond a limit, widening of the road in a densely populated city would require the acquisition of land, which comes with adjunct social and economic costs.