The tunnel was the big surprise. One moment, the taxi was crawling along Marine Drive, a crescent-shape swoop of tarmac in south Mumbai bookended by the old financial district of Nariman Point and the lush, swish greenery of Malabar Hill.
The next, we were diving into a brightly lit, freshly surfaced, eight-lane subterranean highway, emerging in the district of Worli and arriving at my destination – the offices of a global investment bank on Dr Annie Besant Road – a few minutes later.
From hotel lobby to office complex – a journey of 14km, completed in the morning rush hour and amid a biblical deluge of monsoon rain – took 21 minutes. Five years ago, you could have easily doubled and possibly tripled that.
“It’s a gamechanger, isn’t it,” the investment banker said with a smile as we sit down to chat, happy to share in my delight, and repeats, almost in wonderment: “A complete gamechanger.”
And it is. When it comes to traffic, Mumbai’s army of bankers could until recently agree on one thing: it was terrible. Commuting north-south along the horsehead-shaped peninsular was gruelling. You had two choices: either to squeeze into an overcrowded and dangerous overland train, or to buy or hail a car and spend hours a day wearily bouncing along potholed roads having your skeletal structure rearranged.
Today, Mumbai is a city transformed. From Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC), Mumbai’s modern business district, it is a 40-minute journey by car to Nariman Point, using either the Eastern Freeway or the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, which juts out into the Arabian Sea.
A new infrastructure project opens for business every few months. In January, it was the turn of the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link, a six-lane, 22km, $2.1 billion bridge connecting Mumbai with its satellite city of Navi Mumbai. Next up, it’s the turn of the $2 billion Navi Mumbai International Airport. Slated to open in March 2025, it should take the strain off Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the main airport located a stone’s throw from BKC.
So much has changed in Mumbai during the past decade. It’s a city transformed, but to meet its outsized ambitions, there is so much work still to do
But the real gamechanger is the Aqua Line. The city already has three metro lines, but the new line, costed at $4.5 billion and funded with loans from the Asian Development Bank, Germany’s KfW and the Japan International Cooperation Agency, among others, is critical to Mumbai’s aim of becoming a joined-up city.
Set to open in two stages this year from September, the line will run from Cuffe Parade in the south of the peninsular to Sanjay Gandhi National Park in the north via its main airport, cutting the overall journey time from two hours to 25 minutes.
City authorities reckon the new metro line will cut carbon-dioxide emissions by 166,000 tonnes a year. They want the metro network to account for 35.3% of all daily passenger journeys by 2031, against 2.2% in 2017, with the use of motorized vehicles falling during the same period to 34.7% of all journeys, from 62.9%.
Long overdue
It’s as impressive as it is long overdue. Until the mid-19th century, Mumbai was a scatterling of islands whose names – Parel, Worli, Colaba – still identify various districts and suburbs. The land in between was systematically reclaimed, creating a lumpy and rather oddly shaped strip of land prone to flooding.
After India reclaimed independence from Britain in 1947, infrastructure was overlooked for decades, not just in Mumbai but nationwide. So when the city’s transformation from economic backwater to south Asia’s financial hub began in earnest in the 1990s, and car ownership exploded, it was not prepared. All the infrastructure recently opened or set for imminent unveiling needed to be in place 20 years ago.
Even today, Mumbai can be punishing to navigate. If you are shuttling between meetings in, say, BKC and Lower Parel, or Worli and Fort, it makes no sense to use any of the gleaming new highways, bridges and tunnels. The only viable solution is to spend maybe an hour or more in a cab, hemmed in by thousands of other, equally fractious drivers and commuters.
Location technology developer TomTom’s latest Traffic Index ranking, published last year, ranked 387 global cities by average travel time, fuel cost and carbon-dioxide emissions. Mumbai ranked seventh worst, trailing only a handful of cities famous for their gridlock, including Manila. On average, it takes 22 minutes and 30 seconds to drive 10km, compared with 13 minutes in New York, a city with similar topography.
So much has changed in Mumbai during the past decade. It’s a city transformed, but to meet its outsized ambitions – to be a genuine global financial, cultural and economic hub, drawing in investors from around the world and ferrying them to and from work with ease – there is so much work still to do.
