A spectacular bridge that few use
₹61.5 million, or about ₹200 per vehicle. This made sense, because the toll for traversing the whole bridge is ₹250, with smaller amounts for shorter stretches. Sounds like a lot of cars? Sounds like there was plenty of early curiosity about this sparkling new addition to the Mumbai landscape—or seascape, rather—and that settled down to a more routine flow of vehicles? Maybe so.
That’s the way things usually are with sparkling new additions. When the Bandra-Worli Sea Link opened in 2009, plenty of Mumbaikars drove across for a joyride, resulting in a huge rush in those first few days. The rush subsided as the novelty wore off.
By its designers’ own admission, the Sea Link was designed to transport over 100,000 cars daily. The actual number is about 32,000 daily. Less than a third of capacity.
Will something similar happen with the MTHL? To answer that, of course, we need to wait for a while and then measure the traffic on the MTHL. By now, it has been open just over a month. Time enough to draw some conclusions.
And indeed, news items popped up, 30 days on, to tell us some month-old MTHL numbers. The bridge “turned one-month-old on February 13", says one report, “and a total of [813,000] vehicles used the bridge in the past month". Ten days, and now 30 days: you’d expect the second count of vehicles to be three times the first, or close at any rate.
But three times 309,000 is 927,000. The actual count is 813,000—which gives us a daily average, for the month, of 27,100 vehicles. That’s a 12% drop-off from the 10-day count, and a better than 50% drop-off from the novelty-fuelled rush of the second day.
None of this should be surprising, really. Novelty wearing off is one reason usage drops off. Another reason is the cost
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