New Delhi: A soggy, sorry evening with dug-up asphalt swimming in monsoon slush choking with traffic. Rahul Gandhi is forced to take the Delhi Metro to get home. As ad guru Dan Bellack said, "Life is too short for traffic."

Another place, another time. Priya Dutt is two minutes too late to file her Lok Sabha nomination, unable to reach the collector's office in time because of yet another of Mumbai's endless traffic jams.

One tragic evening in Chennai. Thirty-five-year-old Radhika Selvamani is taking her husband to the General Hospital. He has had an heart attack. An hour and many diversions later to escape the dense traffic near Mylapore, the delay kills her husband.

Sunset or sunrise, you ride into hell. Stories like these are part of today's Indian urban legends; in Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Kanpur and Coimbatore, traffic jams kill people in marooned ambulances, desperate mothers are stuck on the way to pick up their children from school, candidates don't make it to job interviews, passengers miss important flights and security forces fail to reach in time to handle terror, as happened during the Akshardham attack of 2002.

These are the street signs of an urban India in collapse; unplanned growth, corruption and above all the aspirational compulsion to buy more and more cars. Reports have the unbroken record for the world's slowest mover held by Archie, winner of the 1995 World Snail Racing Championship; he took a mere two minutes to cover a 13-inch circular course at a speed of 2 m an hour.

The worsening traffic situation in Indian cities threatens their already strained infrastructure. Health and productivity are daily victims.
Compared to the mollusc, our cities have super speed records-Bangalore's peak traffic speed is 18 kmph, while Delhi's and Mumbai's are 16 kmph.

Indian thoroughfares host over 48 modes of transport, with 40 per cent of commercial vehicles plying illegally. Forty-one per cent of streets are taken up by parking. Most Indians drive 10 km on an average daily; one in four spending over 90 minutes every day; 32 per cent of the country's vehicles move on urban roads. India has 50 million two-wheelers and rising.

Despite this, national car sales have grown by 38 per cent; 2009-10 was the pinnacle with 1.95 million cars sold. The cheapest car in India is about 12 times the annual per capita income of a citizen, while in the US it is about one-third the average income. Urban India's love affair with the automobile is scandalous: the country's five mega metros have over 40 lakh cars out of a total vehicular population of 10 crore, its auto market growing by 26 per cent last year. India is paralysed by its traffic.

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