How Should Cities Move People?

At some point in life, you have been stuck in a traffic jam - horns blaring, abuses hurled, governments being blamed. It is a familiar experience from Bengaluru to Los Angeles and is becoming a defining feature of urban life.

This everyday frustration points to something deeper: the mobility system that struggles to connect us to our jobs, schools, hospitals, and social lives. In many ways, mobility is at the heart of what makes a city liveable. A reliable transport system is not just about movement but also about access, equity and economic productivity. As the rate of urbanisation accelerates around the globe, especially in developing countries, the systems are buckling under pressure.

This piece proposes a simple yet powerful framework for assessing any urban transport system, whether in Mumbai, Bogota, or Berlin, through three interlinked lenses: equity, efficiency, and sustainability. These are often treated as trade-offs, but in reality, they reinforce one another. A system that fails on equity will eventually fail on efficiency and sustainability, too.

Efficiency: How Much Do We Lose When Cities Don’t Move?

As an economist, congestion and time loss not only act as a striking statistic but also as a productivity and economic loss. Time spent idling in traffic could be better used working, resting or caring, and when multiplied by millions of commuters, these minutes add up to staggering economic costs.

A study by The Institute for Social and Economic Change suggests that

Bengaluru city alone lost 7.07 lakh productive hours in 2018 due to traffic congestion, amounting to an estimated Rs. 11.7 billion.

With the city’s population and vehicle ownership having only risen since then, the true figure is likely worse.

The instinctive policy response might be to build more flyovers or increase the lanes for motorized vehicles, but research shows this barely works. Improving road infrastructure encourages more people to drive, change routes, or even relocate to the area, making congestion worse than before.

Economists like to call this phenomenon 'Induced Demand'.

Efficiency, therefore, is not about moving cars faster; it is about moving more people using less space and time. On this metric, public transport, especially buses and metros, consistently outperforms private vehicles. A single bus lane can carry several times more people per hour than a mixed-traffic road dominated by cars.

Yet efficiency collapses when systems are poorly integrated. Is the destination within walking distance from the closest metro arrival point? Is the walk pleasant, mainly on the footpath, free of debris and waste? If not, are there buses, the cheapest mode of alternative, available and frequent enough to bridge the gap? India’s own benchmarks reveal a gap.

At the target of 60 buses per lakh of population, it is rather unambitious compared to Singapore’s 150. What’s even surprising is that Mumbai struggles to meet even 50% of the target. The shortfall is overcrowding and longer waits, inspiring people to either abandon public transport altogether or incur hidden costs - in time, money, and stress - to make it usable.

Equity: Who Gets to Move and at What Cost?

The first and most fundamental question is: for whom does the transport system work? Equity in transport is about access. Can people, regardless of income, gender, or physical ability, move from point A to point B without prohibitive monetary costs or otherwise?

Urban India offers the perfect stress test. According to TomTom’s Traffic Index, the average urban Indian spends close to 94 hours a year, travelling just 10 km one-way within the city centre. However, the burden is not equitably distributed. Those with fewer resources tend to live farther from employment hubs due to lower living costs and also depend more on public transportation, but bear the brunt of inflexible travel times. Economists describe this dual burden as the “suburbanisation of poverty” combined with “time poverty.”

Equity gaps widen further when we add a gendered element. A study conducted by the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA) highlights that

Women who take the metro to work spend 21% more money on a trip than men.

This additional cost, considered a ‘pink tax’, reflects women’s greater reliance on taxis or auto-rickshaws to compensate for safety concerns, poor last-mile connectivity, and unreliable services. This is not an isolated pattern. Broader evidence suggests declining satisfaction among women with public transport reliability, frequency, convenience and safety between 2004 and 2019.

However, evidence from multiple contexts suggests that gender-sensitive transport design can be transformative. For instance, the Dakar Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system in Senegal, which incorporated safety features, accessibility improvements, and better service reliability, was associated with an increase in women’s labour force participation from 6% to 43%. While transport alone does not solve gender inequality, it can meaningfully lower one of its most persistent barriers.

When public transport is unsafe, unreliable, or unaffordable, mobility often becomes a privilege rather than a right. The result is a transport system that quietly reproduces inequality, by income, gender, geography, among other dimensions. Equity, therefore, is not a ‘nice-to-have’ add-on to transport policy, but rather a foundational condition. Governments must decide whether cities function as engines of opportunity or as machines that entrench disadvantage.

Sustainability: Intergenerational Costs

Sustainability is narrowly framed as an environmental concern. In reality, it is about whether today’s transport choices will impose rising costs on future generations.  

Globally, the transport sector is responsible for roughly 14% percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, making its transformation critical for tackling the meeting climate goals of the Paris Agreement. Unfortunately, the two and four-wheeler nature of urban transport locks cities in high emissions, air pollution and land use patterns that are difficult to reverse once cities sprawl.

Transport infrastructure shapes behaviour for decades. Roads encourage cars; parking invites more driving; low-density development stretches trip lengths. Once these patterns solidify, retrofitting cities becomes politically and financially expensive.

Ironically, many developing countries where public transport could be most transformative are witnessing rapid urban population growth. Take Mumbai: over the last 15 years, the number of private vehicles has nearly tripled, rising from 17.7 lakh to 48 lakh. In the same period, public transport ridership fell from 119 lakh to 108.7 lakh. Surging incomes, poor public transit quality and status associated with owning an auto vehicle all play a role.

Policy choices often reinforce this trajectory. The automotive industry lobbies with deep pockets and political networks, further obstructing policy from mass transit. Fuel subsidies, parking subsidies, and highway construction quietly subsidise private vehicle use, while public transport systems remain underfunded and strained. The result is cities rewarding the most polluting and space-intensive modes of travel.

The sustainability challenge, then, is not merely technological - switching to electric vehicles or cleaner fuels - but structural. Even electric cars require vast road space, generate congestion, and reinforce car-dependent urban form. Without strong investment in high-capacity public transport, walking, and cycling, emissions reductions alone will not deliver liveable cities.

Transmilenio: the Mass Transit Yardstick?

If one had to find the perfect example to embody the framework discussed above, look no further than the Colombian Capital. Once infamous for its congestion, Bogota transformed its mobility through TransMilenio, a high-capacity bus rapid transit (BRT) system. According to the World Bank,

TransMilenio prevents the release of 250,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually – the equivalent of taking more than 50,000 cars off the road each year.

But its significance exceeds mere emission reduction. The system connects Bogota’s poorer, often marginalised communities on the city’s periphery to the economic core. That too at a fraction of the cost to build an underground metro network. In doing so, it addressed one of the central equity failures of urban transport: the spatial mismatch between where people live and where jobs are located.

Furthermore, onboard bicycle storage and feeder services strengthen last-mile connectivity, integrating sustainability and efficiency.  Pricing challenges for low-income citizens remain, but targeted subsidies have helped sustain ridership. In that sense, TransMilenio serves less as a blueprint to be taken to market and more as a benchmark against which cities can evaluate their own transport choices.

Designing Transport Systems That Work for People

Equity, efficiency, and sustainability are not independent goals.

• Inefficient systems push people toward private vehicles, worsening congestion and emissions.

• Inequitable systems waste time and income, reinforcing socioeconomic divides.

• Unsustainable systems impose health and climate costs that disproportionately fall on the poor.

  A failure in one dimension eventually undermines the others.

  
  

  

This article is not an argument for an ideal single transport system. Cities differ in density, income, geography, and politics. What works for Bogota may not translate directly to Bengaluru or Berlin, but one lesson is clear: transport systems should be evaluated by how well they serve people economically, socially, and environmentally. Urban transport is not just about getting from A to B. It shapes who gets to participate in city life at all.