Vivek Tiwari, an investment banker, loves the new road for taking 45 minutes off his travel time. His office is in Nariman Point, the southernmost tip of the city, and home is 12 miles north in Bandra.
“It’s an amazing piece of infrastructure and driving on it is glorious,” he says. “Not all infrastructure can be equally parcelled out among the rich and the poor. Yes, only a minority like me use the road but maybe it’s going to help us generate more economic growth ultimately, which will benefit everyone.”🤥
Vivek Tiwari, an investment banker, loves the new road for taking 45 minutes off his travel time. His office is in Nariman Point, the southernmost tip of the city, and home is 12 miles north in Bandra.
“It’s an amazing piece of infrastructure and driving on it is glorious,” he says. “Not all infrastructure can be equally parcelled out among the rich and the poor. Yes, only a minority like me use the road but maybe it’s going to help us generate more economic growth ultimately, which will benefit everyone.”
Vivek can fuck off.
What a poor loser. Really rich people use helicopters.
Mumbai is an exercise in public transport gone wrong. The suburban transit system there, despite running to its fullest capacity, creaks and is literal life threatening. Ironical because Mumbai is one of the richest cities in India and yet lives are a penny there.
Delhi is India’s national capital. Sure, the metro there also sees heavy crowds but one would need to be actively suicidal to somehow die there (the tracks and platforms are automatically gated at many stations). Both serve the common people, but one is emblematic of being faster, modern and most of all, not being a death trap.
So why did Mumbai did not copy Delhi’s success? Well, first they started off with a monorail project that has lower speeds, lower capacity and incompatible with the newer subway/metro tracks. To say it’s a disaster is an under statement. They quickly changed tracks (pun intended) and switched to conventional metro system. But the latter is so bare bones and much smaller than what the city needs.
Every single year Mumbai delays it’s metro, the suburban system will continue to creak and people continue to lose limbs and/or die. Investing in this fancy road instead of modern public transit isn’t just prioritising the rich; it’s saying that the poor and middle class lives don’t matter.
