metadata: authors: 0: author: Akbar,Prottoy Aman
1: author: Couture,Victor
2: author: Duranton,Gilles
3: author: Ghani,Syed Ejaz
4: author: Storeygard,Adam
count: India
docna: 0: docna: Mobility and congestion in urban India
docty: Policy Research Working Paper
subtopic: Transport Services,Crime and Society,International Trade and Trade Rules,Telecommunications Infrastructure
teratopic: Social Development,Information and Communication Technologies,International Economics and Trade,Transport
abstracts: cdata!: This paper uses a popular web mapping
            and transportation service to generate information for more
            than 22 million counterfactual trip instances in 154 large
            Indian cities. It then develops a methodology to estimate
            robust indices of mobility for these cities. The estimation
            allows for an exact decomposition of overall mobility into
            uncongested mobility and the congestion delays caused by
            traffic. The paper first documents wide variation in
            mobility across Indian cities. It then shows that this
            variation is driven primarily by uncongested mobility.
            Finally, the paper investigates correlates of mobility and
            congestion. Denser and more populated cities are slower, in
            part because of congestion, especially close to their
            centers. Urban economic development is generally correlated
            with better uncongested mobility, worse congestion, and
            overall with better mobility.
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repnme: repnme: Mobility and congestion in urban India
display_title: Mobility and congestion in urban India
listing_relative_url: /research/2018/08/30339193/mobility-congestion-urban-india
topicv3: Transport m1326661 135,Trade m1326924 698,Criminal Justice m1326993 1014,Population, Aging and Health m1327736 640,Mobile Phone m1505675 3092
publishtoextweb_dt: 2018-08-09T00:00:00Z
historic_topic: Social Development,Information and Communication Technologies,International Economics and Trade,Transport
no_of_pages: 64
author_keys: 0: author_key: 1473784
1: author_key: 930746
2: author_key: 94311
3: author_key: 1048932
model_extractions: WPS8546 Policy Research Working Paper 8546 Mobility and Congestion in Urban India _Prottoy A. Akbar Victor Couture Gilles Duranton Ejaz Ghani Adam Storeygard_ Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment Global Practice August 2018
Policy Research Working Paper 8546

# **Abstract**

This paper uses a popular web mapping and transportation service to generate information for more than 22 million counterfactual trip instances in 154 large Indian cities. It then develops a methodology to estimate robust indices of mobility for these cities. The estimation allows for an exact decomposition of overall mobility into uncongested mobility and the congestion delays caused by traffic. The paper first documents wide variation in mobility across Indian cities. It then shows that this variation is driven primarily by uncongested mobility. Finally, the paper investigates correlates of mobility and congestion. Denser and more populated cities are slower, in part because of congestion, especially close to their centers. Urban economic development is generally correlated with better uncongested mobility, worse congestion, and overall with better mobility.

This paper is a product of the Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment Global Practice. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/research. The authors may be contacted at eghani@worldbank.org).

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
# **Mobility and Congestion in Urban India**

**Prottoy A. Akbar**<sup>_∗_†</sup> **Victor Couture**<sup>_∗_§</sup> _University of Pittsburgh University of California, Berkeley_ **Gilles Duranton**<sup>_∗_‡</sup> **Ejaz Ghani**<sup>_∗_¶</sup> _University of Pennsylvania World Bank_

## Key words: urban transportation, roads, traffic, determinants of travel speed, cities jel classification: r41

> _∗_ This work is supported by the World Bank, the Zell Lurie Center for Real Estate at the Wharton School, the Fisher Center for Urban and Real Estate Economics at Berkeley-Haas, and we also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Global Research Program on Spatial Development of Cities at lse and Oxford funded by the Multi Donor Trust Fund on Sustainable Urbanization of the World Bank and supported by the UK Department for International Development. We appreciate the comments from Leah Brooks, Ben Faber, Ed Glaeser, Vernon Henderson, Ki-Joon Kim, Emile Quinet, Christopher Severen, Kate Vyborny, and participants at conferences and seminars. Hero Ashman, Xinzhu Chen, Allison Green, Xinyu Ma, Gao Xian Peh, and Jungsoo Yoo provided us with excellent research assistance. We are immensely grateful to Sam Asher, Geoff Boeing, Arti Grover, Nina Harari, and Yue Li for their help with the data. The views expressed here are those of the authors and not of any institution they may be associated with.

> †Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh (email: `prottoyamanakbar@pitt.edu` ); `https://pakbar.wordpress.com/` .

> §Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley (email: `couture@haas.berkeley.edu` ); `http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/couture/index.html` .

> ‡Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (email: `duranton@wharton.upenn.edu` ); `https://real-estate.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/21470/` .

> ¶The World Bank (email: `eghani@worldbank.org` ).

> _∥_ Department of Economics, Tufts University (email: `Adam.Storeygard@tufts.edu` );

`https://sites.google.com/site/adamstoreygard/` .
# **1. Introduction**

Using a popular web mapping and transportation service, we generate information for more than 22 million counterfactual trip instances in 154 large Indian cities.<sup>1</sup> We then use this information to estimate a number of indices of mobility (speed) of motorized vehicle travel in these cities. We first assess the robustness of our indices to a wide variety of methodological choices. Second, we decompose overall mobility into uncongested mobility and the congestion delays caused by traffic. Third, we examine how indicators of urban economic development and other city characteristics correlate with mobility, uncongested mobility, and congestion delays. Finally, we provide additional mobility indices for walking and transit trips.

To the best of our knowledge, our paper provides the first systematic empirical investigation of mobility and congestion across cities in a developing country.<sup>2</sup> Our main substantive findings are the following. First, there are large differences in mobility across Indian cities. A factor of nearly two separates the fastest and slowest cities. Second, this variation is driven primarily by uncongested mobility, not congestion. An index of uncongested mobility explains 70% of the variance in overall mobility across cities. Traffic is generally slow in many Indian cities, even outside peak hours.<sup>3</sup> In the slowest decile, we find both small cities, which are slow even without congestion, and large congested cities. Congestion only really matters close to the center of the largest cities. Finally, we find that denser, more populated cities are slower, that there is a hill-shaped relationship between city per capita income and mobility, and that a city’s mobility is related to characteristics of its road network.

This investigation is important for four reasons. First, there is an extreme paucity of useful knowledge about urban transportation, especially in developing countries. As a first building block towards a more serious knowledge base on urban transportation, some stylized facts

> 1By counterfactual, we mean trip instances that have not been actually taken by a household. As we show below, these trips were selected to mimic some characteristics of trips that are taken by households in other contexts.

> 2Two new studies focusing on a single developing city complement our cross-city investigation: Kreindler (2018) studies the welfare impact of congestion pricing in Bangalore, and Akbar and Duranton (2018) measure the cost of congestion in Bogotá.

3We take a broad definition of ‘congestion’ and measure it as difference between travel time at a given time relative to travel time in the absence of traffic. Alternative natural measures of congestion with our data include, for instance, the ratio of the fastest to the slowest instance of trips.

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are needed.<sup>4</sup> For instance, we need to know how slow travel is in developing cities beyond the anecdotal evidence offered by disgruntled travelers. Equally important objects of interest are the differences between cities, between different parts of the same city, and across times of day within the same city.<sup>5</sup> We hope that our results, methodology, and data sources can help guide policy and future research on urban transportation in developing countries. We devote much of the last section of our paper to providing such guidance.

Second, there is a popular view that urbanization and economic development lead to ever larger cities and increased rates of motorization. According to this view, these two features will eventually lead to complete gridlock. We do find evidence of congestion in the largest Indian cities and a strong association between congestion and household access to motorized vehicles. However, economic development also brings about better travel infrastructure which facilitates uncongested mobility. In fact, indicators of urban economic development such as faster recent population growth, higher income levels, and higher motorization rates are generally associated with better overall mobility despite worse congestion.

Third, urban transportation in developing countries is prioritized for massive investments. For instance, transportation is the largest sector of lending by the World Bank and represents more than 20% of its net commitments as of 2016.<sup>6</sup> Among the many problems that these investments are trying to remedy, the lack of urban land devoted to the roadway is widely perceived to be a chief cause behind slow mobility and urban congestion. Providing an assessment of the determinants of mobility to guide policy is thus fundamental. For instance, we evidence that better is associated with a more find suggestive mobility regular grid network and more primary roads.

Fourth, the approach we develop here is an important stepping stone towards measur4In richer countries, much of our knowledge stems from representative surveys of household travel behavior. These surveys nonetheless have clear limitations, including a lack of precision in what travelers report. They are also prohibitively expensive to carry out broadly in developing countries. For the us, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports a cost per household of perhaps $300 to produce the National Household Transportation Survey or about $40 million in total (see `http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/reports/nhts.pdf` . Accessed, January 22, 2018.) 5Several software and data services such as Inrix and TomTom propose popular measures of congestion for a large sample of world cities. These services do not make the details of their methodology public. It seems that they monitor either specific roads or average traffic speed. We show below that measures of average speed are problematic and perform poorly.

6 `http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/801011473440949738/WBAR16-FY16-Lending-Data.pdf` . Accessed, January 23, 2017.

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ing accessibility, which is ultimately relevant to welfare.<sup>7</sup> In our companion paper (Akbar, Couture, Duranton, and Storeygard, 2018), we rely on the mobility (speed) index developed here as key component of an analogous accessibility (travel time) index. The other key component of accessibility is a proximity (distance to destinations) index, which also builds on the approach that we develop here.

Our investigation raises three challenges. The first is methodological. We propose a new approach to measure various forms of mobility from trip information, and to decompose them into uncongested mobility and delays caused by congestion. The second is a travel data challenge. There is no comprehensive source of data about urban transportation in Indian cities. Our approach is to collect data on predicted travel time from a popular website, Google Maps (gm).<sup>8</sup> For each city, we designed a sample of trips and sampled each trip at different times on different days. Our main worry is that these counterfactual trips may not be representative of the actual travel conditions faced by city residents. To address this worry, we use four different trip design strategies. These strategies aim to replicate some characteristics of actual trips taken by urban households in other countries. We show that our city mobility indices vary little by sampling strategies, type of trip destinations, origin and direction of travel, or time of day. Finally, we face the challenge of consistently defining and measuring the cities in which we measure counterfactual trips. To answer this challenge, we rely on a wide variety of sources including the census of India, OpenStreetMap, and satellite imagery.

# **2. Data collection**

In this section we provide an overview of our data. Further details are available in Appendix A.

## **_2.1 City sample_**

United Nations (2015) reports the names and locations of 166 cities in India that reached a population of 300,000 by 2014. Following Harari (2016) and Ch, Martin, and Vargas (2017),

> 7Formal welfare measures of accessibility were pioneered by Ben-Akiva and Lerman (1985) but their data requirements made it hard to implement them empirically. See Couture (2014) for recent developments and Duranton and Guerra (2016), Venter (2016), or Quinet (2017) for reviews on the topic.

> 8 `https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps` . Accessed, January 23, 2017. A number of new studies, which we discuss later in the paper, also use Google Maps to measure traffic in a developing city, notably Kreindler (2016), Hanna, Kreindler, and Olken (2017), and Akbar and Duranton (2018).

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we initially define the spatial extent of these cities using nightlights. Within these light boundaries, we restrict attention to 40-meter pixels defined as built-up in 2014 according to the Global Human Settlements Layer (ghsl) of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (jrc). After dropping cities for which no appropriate light exists, aggregating multiple cities within the same contiguous light, and dropping cities for which the relevant ghsl data are missing, we are left with an estimation sample of 154.

# **_2.2 Trips data_**

We define a _trip_ as a pair of points (origin and destination) within the same city as defined above. A _trip instance_ is a trip taken at a specific time. Our target sample for city _c_ is 15 � _Popc_ trips, where _Popc_ is the projected 2015 population of city _c_ from United Nations (2015), and 10 trip instances per trip, to ensure variation across times of day. For a city of population, say, one million, our sampling strategy thus targets 15,000 trips and 150,000 trip instances. Our sampling strategy is symmetrical, in the sense that each trip from origin _o_ to destination _d_ has a counterpart trip from origin _d_ to destination _o_ .<sup>9</sup> All trips are restricted to be at least one kilometer between origin and destination because Google results are less reliable for very short trips, few of which we expect to be motorized anyway. We sample across times of day to roughly match the weekday distribution of actual trips in Bogotá from Akbar and Duranton (2018). We oversample sparse overnight periods, and sample weekends at half the rate of weekdays.

We sample across four broad classes of trips, each designed to reflect key aspects of urban travel: radial, circumferential, gravity, and amenity trips.

Radial trips join a randomly located point within 1.5 kilometers of a city’s center (as defined by United Nations, 2015) with another point in the city, either approximately 2, 5, 10, or 15 kilometers away, or at a distance percentile drawn from a uniform distribution. These trips are those predicted by the standard monocentric model of cities (Alonso, 1964, Mills, 1967, Muth, 1969). This models a reasonable first-order characterization of the distribution of population, density, and land and house prices in cities of many countries (see Duranton and Puga, 2015, for a survey).

Circumferential trips, orthogonal to radial trips, join a randomly located origin at least 2 kilometers from the city center with a destination at approximately the same radius but

> 9Unless otherwise indicated, random points are drawn with uniform probability from a support that is all valid 40-meter pixels within a city as defined above.

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displaced approximately 30 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise.

Gravity trips join a random origin with a destination in a random direction, at a distance that is drawn from a truncated Pareto distribution with shape parameter 1 and support between one kilometers and 250 kilometers. Both commutes and city trips in general have been shown to reflect this distribution in many contexts (Ahlfeldt, Redding, Sturm, and Wolf, 2015, Akbar and Duranton, 2018).

Amenity trips join a random origin with an instance of one of 17 amenities (e.g. shopping malls, schools, train stations) as recorded in Google Places. The particular establishment selected is based on a combination of proximity and “prominence” assigned by Google. The weighting across these amenity types is based on a mapping of amenities to trip purposes whose share we draw from the 2008 us National Household Transportation Survey (nhts) (Couture, Duranton, and Turner, 2018).

Using the sampling scheme above, we simulated 22,661,818 trip instances in Google Maps, covering 1,166,738 locations pairs and, hence, 2,333,476 trips across all cities and strategies, over 40 days between September and November of 2016.<sup>10</sup> For each trip, we record origin, destination, trip type, and length and estimated duration of Google’s recommended route under current traffic conditions (which we sometimes refer to as real-time travel time), as well as the time required for the same route without traffic and with “typical” traffic.<sup>11</sup> Google’s route selection and speed estimates are based on the location and speed of mobile phones using the Android operating system, as well as other phones running Google software, especially Google Maps. Accurate measurement thus requires that drivers are providing information. It is therefore possible that estimates are worse in cities with lower mobile phone penetration. This is unlikely to affect our results. There were 300 million smartphone users in India as of the 4th quarter of 2016.<sup>12</sup> In December of 2015, 71% of 10A further 115,733 trip instances were collected for Bokaro Steel City in December 2017 as the un database initially reported its location incorrectly. However, Bokaro is excluded from all results in section 6. We also describe the data we use for transit and walking trips below.

11While Google Maps does not report how it calculates travel time under regular traffic conditions, it generally provides the same answer for the same trip queried on different week days at the same time but not for the same trip queried at the different times.

12 Source: `http://www.counterpointresearch.com/press_release/indiahandset2016q4analysis/` . While not all smartphones use Android, in the second quarter of 2016, 97% of smartphones shipped in India did. Source: `http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/ googles-android-captured-97-indian-smartphone-market-share-in-q2-2016-report-2957566/` 5
mobile internet users were urban.<sup>13</sup> Given a 1.324 Billion population of India in 2016, and a 31% urbanization rate from the 2011 Census, a naive calculation implies that 52% of urban residents, including residents of smaller cities, and children, have smartphones. In setting up their phones, users may choose to opt out of sending information to Google. However, the opt-out rate, which Google does not publish, would have to be extremely high to affect our results. Crucially, to estimate slowed traffic on a block, Google only needs one vehicle with a phone, and by definition, time-varying congestion implies many vehicles. Put together, this suggests that all cities have enough phones to generate high-quality speed estimates. We discuss further evidence regarding the reliability of Google Maps information below.

# **_2.3 City-level data_**

Several pieces of information were derived from administrative data. Daily labor earnings by district and gender are from the Employment and Unemployment Survey of the National Sample Survey (nss-eue) 2011–12. Population, and share of population with access to a car or motorcycle by “town” (fourth administrative level) are from the 2011 Census. We assign city populations as follows. The population of those towns falling completely within a city light are fully included. Towns falling partially within a city light contribute a share of their population defined by the share of the town’s land area falling in the light. The other census variables (earnings, share of households with access to a car, motorcycle) are analogously aggregated using the resulting town population shares.

Weather data are from Weather Underground.<sup>14</sup> Data were available for 112 of 154 cities, for from one to 144 periods per day, with a median of eight. Population growth from 1990 to 2015 is from United Nations (2015). We also use variables that characterize ‘urban shape’ computed by Harari (2016). Data on characteristics of the road network within a (lightsbased) city are from OpenStreetMap via GeoFabrik, and processed through OSMnx.<sup>15</sup>

> 13Source: `http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/ mobile-internet-users-in-india-to-reach-371-mn-by-june-2016/` . While this is not just smartphones, presumably smartphone users are substantially more likely than other mobile phone users to be mobile internet users.

> 14 `https://www.wunderground.com/`

> 15 `http://download.geofabrik.de/asia/india.html` Accessed 2016/9/23.

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# **3. A methodology for measuring mobility**

## **_3.1 A general conceptual framework_**

Consider the following general travel problem faced by a household. Its members work and conduct errands at several destinations, selected from a potentially large choice set. Potential destinations are costly to reach. To maximize utility, the household will choose to undertake some trips and not others. Some important decisions like household location and car purchases may also be made simultaneously with local mobility and accessibility. Fully modeling this presents overwhelming theoretical challenges and data requirements.

This travel problem is clearly not tractable unless we drastically simplify it. As a starting point, we note that the household travel problem is not unlike the standard consumption problem where consumers choose their basket from a large number of goods. We often simplify this consumption problem by considering a price index. We can do the same thing for the choice of destinations made by households. In each city, we can consider a number of residential locations and attempt to measure the cost of a ‘typical’ trip. The data requirements are still considerable but no longer overwhelming. The pitfalls of this approach are the same as those associated with typical price indices. Not knowing the preferences of households, it is unclear how travel costs (i.e., the prices) should be aggregated, keeping in mind that different households with different preferences face different price indices.

To minimize these pitfalls, we show that our mobility indices do not depend on how we weight different kinds of trips. In particular, our indices vary little by sampling strategies, type of trip destinations, origin and direction of travel, or time of day. This is because slower cities are slower at all times, for all types of trips, and throughout the city. As a result, we need not rely on a particular utility specification to tell us how to weight, say, a trip to the train station at peak hour on a weekday relative to a trip to a shopping destination on the weekend.<sup>16</sup>

> 16While generalized transportation costs involve money, time, and several dimensions of travel comfort and travel conditions (Small and Verhoef, 2007), here we can only focus on time. This generalization is not as extreme as it seems. First, if we think of travel time as home production and value it at half the wage as is customary in the literature, it represents a large share of the overall cost of travel. Second, many other components of travel costs such as gas consumption and vehicle depreciation are also correlated with travel distance and thus with travel time.

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# **_3.2 Measuring mobility_**

We want to measure the ease of going from an origin to a destination in cities. We focus on the speed of road travel using a motorized vehicle.<sup>17</sup> Measuring the speed of travel in a city raises a number of challenges since trips differ considerably in their length, location of origin and destination, time and day of departure, and mode.

The simplest approach is to compute a measure of mean speed for a given city: where _c_ denotes a city and _i_ is a trip instance. Because we sum the length _Di_ of all trip instances in city _c_ and divide by the sum of trip durations _Ti_ , the ratio _Sc_<sup>_m_is a length-weighted</sup> measure of travel speed. It is straightforward to define the corresponding unweighted mean.

Means are attractive because of their simplicity and ease of computation. However, in our case means may not be comparable across cities for two reasons. First, although we sample a large number of trips, we may not observe trips in different cities taking place under exactly the same conditions such as time of departure. Second and most importantly, our trip generation strategy implies that trip length and distance to the center differ systematically across cities. As we show below, these characteristics are important determinants of trip speed. We can condition them out by estimating the following type of regression: where the dependent variable is log trip speed ( _Si_ = _Di_ / _Ti_ ), _Xi_ is a vector of characteristics for trip instance _i_ , _sc_<sup>_f e_</sup> ( _i_ )<sup>is a fixed effect for city</sup><sup>_c_, and</sup><sup>_εi_is an error term.</sup> If trip characteristics are appropriately centered and the errors are normally distributed, _S_ ˆ _c_<sup>_f e_=exp</sup> _s_ ˆ _c_<sup>_f e_+</sup><sup>_φ_ˆ2/2</sup> is a measure of predicted speed for a typical trip in city _c_ where _φ_<sup>ˆ</sup> is � � the estimator of the standard deviation of the error term _ε_ . Note that for we can simplicity ˆ directly use _sc_<sup>_f e_as an index of mobility.</sup> Equation (2) does not specify the exact content of the vector of characteristics _X_ . In addition to the city within which a trip takes place, we expect the main variables that determine the speed of a motorized trip in our data to be its length, time of departure, distance to the center, and perhaps the type of the trip. We also expect trip speed to be affected by weather

> 17Data from the 2011 Indian census suggests that 46% of urban commutes, and 55% of urban commutes longer than 1 kilometer, are by motorized road transport.

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conditions. We will test the robustness of our estimates of the city fixed effects with respect to which variables are included in the regression and how.

Travel conditions may also vary across cities in ways that may not be well captured by equation (2). For instance, we find below that peak hours are relatively slower and last longer in more congested cities. To capture this, we first estimate a more flexible version of equation (2) where we allow both the constant and the vector of coefficients to vary across cities: Equation (3) includes many coefficients for each city. Comparing for instance the time of day effect for traffic between 9.30 and 10 p.m. across 154 cities will not be insightful. Rather than keep all these coefficients separate, we aggregate them into index measures of mobility for each city.

More specifically, we proceed as follows. We first estimate equation (3) for each city separately. Each of these 154 regressions can be used to generate a predicted speed for all trips in ˆ _′_ the data, telling us how fast trip _i_ would be if it were taken in city _c_ : _S_<sup>ˆ</sup> _ci_ = exp � _αcXi_<sup>+</sup><sup>_φ_ˆ</sup> _c_<sup>2/2</sup> �. We also predict speeds from an analogous ‘national’ regression using all trip instances by ˆ _′_ imposing common coefficients regardless of the city of travel: _S_<sup>ˆ</sup> _i_ = exp � _αXi_<sup>+</sup><sup>_φ_ˆ2/2</sup> �.

Then, we compute a predicted duration for each trip _i_ if it were to take place in city _c_ ( _T_<sup>ˆ</sup> _ci_ = _Di_ / _S_<sup>ˆ</sup> _ci_ ) or ‘nationally’ ( _T_<sup>ˆ</sup> _i_ = _Di_ / _S_<sup>ˆ</sup> _i_ ). Finally we can compute a relative speed index for each city: The index _Lc_ represents the time it would take to conduct all trip instances in the data at the estimated speed for city _c_ relative to the predicted time it would take to conduct these trips at the average estimated ‘national’ speed. _Lc_ is a unitless scalar, but we can multiply it by ∑ _i Di_ / ∑ _i T_<sup>ˆ</sup> _i_ , the average national speed, to transform it into a predicted speed for city _i_ .

We note that the index _Lc_ defined in equation (4) resembles a Laspeyres price index in the sense that we compare the speed of trips across Indian cities for the same national bundle of trip instances. Like a standard Laspeyres index, _Lc_ may be sensitive to sampling error or to out-of-sample predictions.

Alternatively, we can compute the predicted time it takes to undertake all city _c_ trips in city _c_ relative to the predicted time it needed to undertake all city _c_ trips from a national 9
regression. That is, we can compute: This alternative speed index is analogous to a Paasche price index. Because we compare city trips at predicted city speed to city trips at predicted national speed, this Paasche index will be less sensitive to the problems of out-of-sample predictions that may afflict the Laspeyres index above. It is also straightforward to compute the corresponding Fisher index: _Fc_ = _√Lc × Pc_ .

Finally, we can compute a broad class of mobility indices derived from logit or ces utility specifications. In the logit case of Ben-Akiva and Lerman (1985), the travel decision is a discrete choice over a set of trip destinations. In Appendix B, we derive the following mobility index, which resembles the (inverse of) the familiar ces price index: where _bci_ is a quality parameter for the destination of trip _i_ in city _c_ , and _σ_ is an elasticity of substitution between trip destinations. In this standard utility maximization framework, cheaper (shorter) trips receive more weight, with the strength of that relationship governed by the elasticity of substitution _σ_ . To construct the denominator of _Gc_ , we use a nonparametric procedure to compute, from the national sample, the average duration _Ti_ of trips with approximately the same length as trip _i_ in city _c_ . This procedure delivers a pure mobility index that depends only on speed differences across cities.<sup>18</sup> Instead of tackling the difficult problem of estimating the parameters of _Gc_ , we show that for a wide range of values of _σ_ and _bci_ , _Gc_ is highly correlated with our benchmark index from equation (3). We also experiment with richer nesting structures, in which trips to similar destination types (e.g., work, shopping, medical/dental, etc) are more substitutable.<sup>19</sup> It is important to keep in mind that the observations used to estimate equations (2) and (3) and to compute the indices in equations (4), (5), and (6) are counterfactual trips, not actual

> 18To see this, note that both the city-level numerator and the national-level denominator of _Gc_ have the same number of trips, and the same distribution of trip lengths. The index in each city is therefore free of gains from variety and gains from closer proximity to travel destinations, and determined only by speed differences relative to a national sample.

> 19As another example, consider a utility function with limited scheduling flexibility, as in Kreindler (2018). Such a function would increase the weight of slow peak travel. Our approach is to show that mobility indices based on only peak time trips are highly correlated with those based on all trips.

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trips. This presents both benefits and costs. The main advantage of our approach is that trips are exogenously chosen. Unlike Couture _et al._ (2018), we do not need to worry about the simultaneous determination of some variables such as trip length and speed, which could affect the estimates of city fixed effects in equations (2) and (3).<sup>20</sup> Conceptually, this approach is similar to measuring price indices from store price tags instead of from consumers’ transactions.

This is also a limitation of our method. The instances that we exogeneity potential trip query do not correspond to actual trips and may not be representative of the travel conditions faced by urban travelers when they demand to travel. If our trips are far enough from representative, and if the speed of various types of trips varies across cities, then our mobility indices will be mismeasured.

To this criticism, we have four answers. The first is that some of the trips we created were designed to resemble what we know about actual trips in other cities, with respect to either their direction, the type of destination (and their frequency), or their length. Second, our four trip types (radial, circumferential, gravity, amenity) are designed to reflect reality in distinct ways. We show below that when we introduce a comprehensive sets of controls for other trip characteristics, the economic significance of the trip type indicators in equation (3) is small. Third and most important, our large sample allows us to estimate mobility indices for each trip type, destination, time of day, distance to city center, and various other subsamples. These indices are all highly correlated with our baseline index. As argued earlier, this result implies that our indices do not depend in an important way on the particular utility weight that each counterfactual trip could receive. Finally, Akbar and Duranton (2018) use Google Maps in Bogotá to measure the speed of actual trips reported in a transportation survey and counterfactual trips designed using the same strategy as here. Within short time intervals within days, the speeds of the two types of trips are virtually indistinguishable from each other, and from measures of speed reported by Uber for comparable trips.

# **_3.3 Disentangling two sources of mobility: Uncongested mobility and congestion._**

Mobility can naturally be decomposed into two components: an uncongested or “free flow” speed, and a congestion factor. To separate the “intrinsic” slowness of a city from its congestion, we can adapt the approach proposed above. To measure mobility, we use as dependent

> 20For instance, as mobility gets better travelers may choose to travel to further destinations. In addition, the (counterfactual) trip instances that we query do not affect real traffic conditions.

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ˆ variable in equation (2) the log of actual trip speed and estimate city fixed effects _sc_<sup>_f e_that we</sup> can interpret as an index of mobility. To measure mobility _in the absence of traffic_ , we repeat the same estimation as with actual speed but use as dependent variable the log of speed in the absence of traffic returned by Google Maps for each query. The resulting city fixed effects ˆ _ntc_<sup>_f e_are our index of uncongested mobility.21</sup> To measure congestion, we repeat the same estimation using the difference between log trip duration with traffic and log trip duration without traffic, log _Ti −_ log _Ti_<sup>_nt_</sup> = log( _Ti_ / _Ti_<sup>_nt_),</sup> as the dependent variable. While strictly speaking, the city fixed effects, _f_<sup>ˆ</sup> _c_<sup>_f e_, that we estimate</sup> are a measure of delay, we can interpret them as a broad index of congestion, which we refer to as the congestion factor.

The dependent variable when estimating mobility is log _Si_ = log _Di −_ log _Ti_ . The dependent variable when estimating mobility in the absence of traffic is log _Si_<sup>_nt_</sup> = log _Di −_ log _Ti_<sup>_nt_.</sup> It then follows that when estimating the congestion factor we have log _Ti −_ log _Ti_<sup>_nt_</sup> = _−_ (log _Si_<sup>_nt−_log</sup><sup>_Si_).</sup> Our third regression thus uses as dependent variable the difference between the dependent variables of the first two regressions. Because we estimate these three regressions for the same trip instances using the same set of covariates, it follows directly from simple econometrics that a city’s congestion factor is the difference between its uncongested mobility factor and its overall mobility factor: This result is useful on two counts. First, it provides us with an exact decomposition which we exploit below. Second, when we regress these three city fixed effects on the same set of city determinants below, the estimated coefficients will also conveniently add up. For instance, the estimated effect of city population on mobility will be equal to the estimated effect of city population on mobility in the absence of traffic minus the estimated effect of city population on the congestion factor.

> 21Alternatively, recall that we observe each trip an average of ten times and oversample times in the middle of the night when we expect very little traffic. We can treat the speed of the fastest trip instance as an estimate of uncongested speed. In practice, these two methods yield city congestion indices with a Spearman correlation coefficient of 0.96.

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# **4. Trip-level results**

## **_4.1 Descriptive statistics_**

We queried 22,777,551 unique trip instances. After eliminating a small fraction of trips for which trip length is not well measured or larger than the haversine distance between origin and destination by more than 50 kilometers, we are left with 22,744,156 observations, 14.8% of which are weekend trips.<sup>22</sup> Some basic trip statistics are reported in table 1. Average travel speed is 22 kilometers per hour. While the interquartile range is fairly small at only about 8 kilometers per hour, the tails of the distribution are quite long. Similar observations can be made for trip duration and length. The average trip under actual traffic conditions lasts about 13% more time than its counterpart without traffic. Keeping in mind that we oversampled trips taken at night, we return to this issue below. Finally, the average trip is about 50% longer than its “effective” (haversine) length.

Table 2 reports summary statistics for the 154 cities in our sample. They are on average large, with a mean population above 1.3 million, and fast growing, having doubled in population since 1990.<sup>23</sup> Variation across cities in rates of access to personal motorized transportation and road infrastructure stocks are substantial.

Table 3 reports descriptive statistics for various naive measures of mean city travel speed. Mean travel speed across cities is 24.4 kilometers per hour.<sup>24</sup> This is rather slow, especially given that faster night trips are somewhat oversampled. By comparison, Akbar and Duranton (2018) estimate a similar mean speed using a comparable methodology in Bogotá, Colombia, a highly congested city of nearly nine million, and Couture _et al._ (2018) report a mean trip speed by privately-owned vehicles of 38.5 kilometers per hour in us metropolitan

> 22Google Maps often provides problematic routes for motorized travel on short trips. Furthermore, Google Maps rounds trip lengths, and moves our origin and destination points to the nearest road. In extreme cases, such as when a sampled origin is in the middle of a large park, this can lead to routes that are shorter than the haversine distance between the sampled origin and destination. To limit these problems we consider only trips longer than one kilometer. These problems still sometimes arise beyond one kilometer.

23The two sources of population differ both because of the target year and because they are based on slightly different boundaries. In most cases differences are small, but a few cities in Kerala are substantially smaller using our lights-based definition than in the un database. These cities appear to have a particularly expansive urban agglomeration as defined by the Indian census.

24This cross-city mean is slightly larger than the overall population mean of 22.1 kilometers per hour reported in table 1 because travel speed is faster in smaller cities for which we have fewer observations.

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**Table 1:** Trip statistics

||Mean|St. dev.|1|per<br>10|centile:<br>25|50|75|90|99|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Speed|22.1|7.1|11.5|14.7|17.1|20.6|25.4|31.6|45.8|
|Duration|20.0|17.6|4|7|9|14|23|40|93|
|Duration (no traffc)|17.2|14|4|6|9|13|20|33|76|
|Trip length|8.2|10|1.3|1.9|2.9|4.7|8.9|17.9|54.1|
|Effective length|5.4|7.0|1.0|1.2|1.8|2.9|5.5|11.9|39.6|

_Note:_ 22,744,156 observations. Durations are in minutes, lengths in kilometers; and speeds in kilometers/hour.

**Table 2:** Summary statistics for Indian cities

||Mean|St. dev.|Min.|Max.|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|Population (’000, Census/lights, 2011)|1,328|3,031|19|23,889|
|Population (’000; UN, 2015)|1,545|3,179|307|25,703|
|Population growth 1900-2015 (%)<br>|106|65|31|399|
|Total area (km<sup>2</sup>)|238|414|5.91|3,569|
|Total roads length (km)|1,393|3,451|10|32,513|
|Motorways (km)|43.9|64.5|0|437|
|Primary roads (km)|44.1|77.3|0|481|
|Share households with car access (%)|9.99|5.78|2.33|31.5|
|Share households with motorcycle access (%)|41.3|11.7|5.83|73.4|
|Mean dailyearnings($)|4.91|1.93|2.00|12.28|

_Notes:_ Cross-city averages not weighted by population. 153 cities except for vehicle registrations for which one city is missing.

**Table 3:** Summary statistics for travel speed in Indian cities

||Mean|St. dev.|Min.|Max.|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|All trips|24.4|3.79|16.2|34.9|
|Radial trips|22.2|3.79|14.8|32.8|
|Circumferential trips|20.6|3.23|14.3|29.5|
|Gravity trips|22.6|3.42|14.7|30.9|
|Amenity trips|26.9|6.08|16.6|42.0|
|All trips, unweighted by length|21.8|2.90|15.7|31.4|
|All trips, in absence of traffc|26.8|4.49|16.3|38.1|
|All trips,effective speed|16.4|2.77|11.6|24.0|

_Notes:_ 154 cities. Speed in kilometers per hour.

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areas.<sup>25</sup> This said, 24.4 kilometers per hour is much higher than the sometimes apocalyptic descriptions found in the popular press.

We note considerable differences in mean speed across cities. The standard deviation across cities is 3.8 kilometers per hour, more than half the standard deviation of 7.2 across trips in table 1. Mean speed for the slowest city is 16.2 kilometers per hour whereas it is more than twice as high for the fastest city at 34.9. We show below that these wide raw speed differences remain once we adequately control for features of our sampling strategy.

The second to the fifth rows of table 3 report mean speed for each type of trip separately. Circumferential trips are slower whereas amenity trips are faster. As we show below, these differences are mostly caused by differences in length and location.

The sixth row of table 3 reports a measure of mean speed by city, which, unlike the other rows, is not weighted by trip length. Because this increases the influence of shorter trips that are also slower, this unweighted mean of 21.8 kilometers per hour is slightly lower than the length-weighted mean of 24.4 reported in the first row.

The seventh row of table 3 exploits the information provided by Google Maps regarding trip duration in the absence of traffic. As expected, mean speed in the absence of traffic is higher but the difference is small. At 26.8 kilometers per hour, mean speed in the absence of traffic is only about 10% above the mean of actual speed reported in the first row. Interestingly, the variation across cities is not smaller for mean speed in the absence of traffic than for actual mean speed. If anything, it becomes slightly larger. We return to this intriguing finding below.

Finally, the last row of table 3 reports a measure of mean effective speed. Rather than trip length, we use the haversine distance between the origin and destination. Since the ratio between mean trip length and effective trip length is about 1.5 in table 1, we unsurprisingly find a roughly similar ratio between actual and effective trip speed.

# **_4.2 Trip regressions_**

Before an in-depth analysis of mobility indices and their correlates, we first estimate a number of variants of the generic regression described by equation (2).

25If anything, 38.5 kilometers per hour understates true travel speed since it is measured from a travel survey where respondents view trip duration as much more than just the time spent driving in traffic.

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**Table 4:** Determinants of log trip speed

||(1)|(2)|(3)|(4)|(5)|(6)|(7)|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|log trip length|0.24<sup>_a_</sup><br>(0.0036)|0.14<sup>_a_</sup><br> (0.012)|0.14<sup>_a_</sup><br> (0.012)|0.24<sup>_a_</sup><br> (0.0036)|0.14<sup>_a_</sup><br> (0.012)|0.14<sup>_a_</sup><br> (0.012)|0.13<sup>_a_</sup><br> (0.015)|
|log trip length<sup>2</sup>||0.014<sup>_a_</sup><br>(0.0034)|0.014<sup>_a_</sup><br>(0.0035)||0.014<sup>_a_</sup><br>(0.0034)|0.014<sup>_a_</sup><br>(0.0034)|0.016<sup>_a_</sup><br>(0.0045)|
|log distance to center||0.15<sup>_a_</sup>|0.15<sup>_a_</sup>||0.14<sup>_a_</sup>|0.14<sup>_a_</sup>|0.098|
|||(0.042)|(0.042)||(0.041)|(0.041)|(0.063)|
|log distance to center<sup>2</sup>||0.025|0.025||0.031|0.031|0.041|
|||(0.023)|(0.023)||(0.022)|(0.022)|(0.034)|
|Type: circumferential|-0.015<sup>_a_ </sup><br>(0.0020)|-0.0039<sup>_b_</sup><br>(0.0016)|-0.0040<sup>_b_ </sup><br>(0.0016)|-0.015<sup>_a_ </sup><br>(0.0020)|-0.0037<sup>_b_</sup><br>(0.0016)|-0.0038<sup>_b_ </sup><br>(0.0016)|-0.0017<br>(0.0019)|
|Type: gravity|0.077<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.0032|-0.0032|0.079<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.0027|-0.0027|0.00098|
||(0.0065)|(0.0032)|(0.0032)|(0.0066)|(0.0032)|(0.0033)|(0.0043)|
|Type: amenity|0.082<sup>_a_</sup>|0.0064<sup>_c_ </sup>|0.0063<sup>_c_</sup>|0.083<sup>_a_</sup>|0.0066<sup>_c_ </sup>|0.0065<sup>_c_</sup>|0.0087|
||(0.0058)|(0.0036)|(0.0036)|(0.0057)|(0.0036)|(0.0036)|(0.0054)|
|City effect|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|
|Day effect|Y|Y|Y|weekd.|weekd.|weekd.|Y|
|Time effect|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|
|Weather|N|N|Y|N|N|Y|only|
|Observations|22,744,156|-|-<br>|19,385,656|-|-|10,319,939|
|R-squared|0.48|0.53|0.53|0.48|0.53|0.53|0.51|
|Cities|154|154|154|154|154|154|107|

_Notes:_ OLS regressions with city, day, and time of day (for each 30 minute period) indicators. Log speed is the dependent variable in all columns. Robust standard errors in parentheses. _a_ , _b_ , _c_ : significant at 1%, 5%, 10%. All trip instances in columns 1-3. Only weekday trip instances in columns 4-6. Sample sizes for columns 1 and 4 apply to columns 1–3 and 4–6, respectively. Only weekday trip instances for which we have weather information in column 7. Weather in column 3 and 6 consists of indicators for rain (yes, no, missing), thunderstorms (yes, no, missing), wind speed (13 indicator variables), humidity (12 indicator variables), and temperature (8 indicator variables). These variables are introduced as continuous variables in column 7.

A first series of results is reported in table 4. Column 1 regresses log trip speed on city fixed effects controlling for log trip length, an indicator for each type of trip, each day of the week, and each thirty-minute period during the day. Column 2 introduces further controls: the of the distance to the center a location as the square log trip length, log (defining trip’s midpoint between its origin and destination), and its square. Column 3 further adds weather variables (and indicators for missing weather data). Columns 4 to 6 repeat the specifications of columns 1 to 3 on a sample of only weekday trips. Column 7 is restricted to observations with non-missing weather data.

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Table 4 reports selected coefficients. Longer trips are faster: the elasticity of trip speed with respect to trip length is 0.24 in columns 1 and 4, and larger for longer trips in the other columns where we introduce a quadratic term. This is a prominent feature of urban transportation data in other contexts.<sup>26</sup> Regressing log trip speed on log trip length without any further control yields an R<sup>2</sup> of 0.40.

Unsurprisingly, trips further from the center are also faster. The elasticity of trip speed with respect to distance from the center of 0.15 is a quite large, implying that a trip at 10 kilometers from the center of a city is about 40% faster than one a kilometer away.

In column 1, we find fairly large differences of up to 10% in speed between different types of trips. These differences become mostly insignificant and economically small when controls for trip location are added in column 2. In the end, amenity trips are slightly faster while circumferential trips are slower but the speed difference between them is only about 1%. We also note that regressing log trip speed solely on trip type indicators yields an R<sup>2</sup> of only about 0.003. These two results are reassuring, and suggest that the design of our hypothetical trips is not driving our results. In Appendix C, we report versions of table 4 for each type of trip. While the non-linearities for the effect of trip length and distance to the center slightly differ, the results overall are similar to those in table 4, suggesting that the simple additive specification of table 4 is not obscuring deeper differences between trip types.

We now turn to the regression coefficients not reported in table 4. Starting with the weather, we find that characteristics associated with bad weather such as rain, high levels of humidity, high temperatures, and more windy conditions tend to be associated with slightly _higher_ travel speeds. For instance, in columns 3 and 6, trips in rain are 2–3% faster.

To explain this contrast, we conjecture that roads in many Indian cities are ‘multi-purpose’ public goods used by various classes of motorized and non-motorized vehicles to travel and park as well as a wide variety of other users such as street-sellers, animals, or children playing. Non-transportation uses of the roadway arguably slow down motorized vehicles. Worse weather may reduce these activities and thus make travel faster. We provide further indirect evidence for this conjecture below.<sup>27</sup>

> 26 Couture _et al._ (2018) estimate a larger elasticity close to 0.40 using self-reported us data where the measure of trip duration also includes a fixed cost of getting into one’s vehicle and getting into traffic. Using self-reported data, Akbar and Duranton (2018) find an even larger elasticity for Bogotá travelers, because their sample also includes transit trips, with even larger fixed costs. Using analogous Google Maps data for the same Bogotá trips, Akbar and Duranton (2018) find an elasticity of 0.21, very close to the elasticity estimated here.

> 27However, it is important to note that our data collection period did not include monsoon season. Extreme weather conditions may affect mobility negatively, including for a period of time after they end.

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**Figure 1:** Estimated time effects for weekday travel

<!-- Start of picture text --> Estimated time effect<br>0<br>-0.1<br>-0.2<br>-0.3<br>154 Cities<br>-0.4<br>20 Largest cities<br>-0.5 Delhi<br>Delhi (< 5km)<br>Hour of day<br>-0.6<br>0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24<br><!-- End of picture text --> The plain black line represents the time effects estimated in column 5 of table 4 for all 154 cities. The dashed black line represents the hour effects from the same estimation but restricts observations to the 20 largest cities. The plain gray line duplicates the same exercise for Delhi only. The dotted gray line only uses observations for which the distance to the center of the origin and destination is on average less than 5 kilometers in Delhi. All 3 - 3.30 a.m. effects are normalized to zero. All the plotted coefficients for 7am to midnight are significant at 1%.

As expected, we also observe fluctuations in travel speed across times of day. In figure 1, the dark continuous line plots the fixed effect of each thirty-minute period estimated in column 5 of table 4. For all cities, the gap between the fastest time in the middle of the night and the slowest at 6.30 p.m. is just 13%. We also note that morning peak hours are more muted than the evening peak hours.<sup>28</sup> The figure also plots the same coefficients estimated only on the twenty largest cities. The patterns are much more marked. The slowest periods in the evening are now more than 25% slower than the fastest in middle of the night. In addition, travel speed starts declining earlier in the morning and recovers later in the evening.

While larger, this difference remains less important than that estimated by Akbar and Duranton (2018) for Bogotá where the slowest period is about half as fast as the fastest. These mild within-day fluctuations may mask a lot of heterogeneity across Indian cities. To investigate this, we repeat the same exercise using only observations from the city of Delhi. Although Delhi is slow, we purposefully do not take the slowest city or a pathological case.

28Although we do not report the results here, we can also estimate time of day effects more accurately using trip fixed effects. The resulting estimates for time of day effects are virtually indistinguishable.

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**Figure 2:** Kernel density for estimated city effects

<!-- Start of picture text --> 4 Density<br>3<br>2<br>1<br>Fixed<br>effect<br>estimates<br>0<br>-0.4 -0.2 0 0.2 0.4<br><!-- End of picture text --> The city effects are as estimated in column 5 of table 4 for all 154 cities. Epanechnikov kernel with bandwidth of 0.031.

The pattern is the same as for the 20 largest cities but more pronounced. The slowest time is now 35% slower than the fastest. Restricting attention further to trips taking place on average within five kilometers of the center of Delhi generates even more extreme patterns with the slowest time now being more than 40% slower than the fastest.<sup>29</sup> If we take the difference between the fastest and slowest time as a measure of summary 1. congestion, we can draw several lessons from figure First, in many cities, there may not be that much congestion. Travel speed is slow and does not vary much throughout the day as the demand for travel changes. It is only in the largest cities and more particularly in their centers that travel speed experiences considerable variation during the day. We return to this below. Third, the evolution of travel speeds during the day reflects more than standard commuting patterns. Travel speed declines from roughly 5.30 a.m. to midday, the lowest speed are observed around 6.30 - 7 p.m., and only slowly recover late into the evening. This is consistent with the conjecture raised above that the roadway is used for multiple purposes from late in the morning until well into the evening.

29Since India is a vast country with a single time-zone, attenuated within-day fluctuations could be due to the timing of sunrise and sunset. Within our sample, there is range of up to a 98 minutes in sunrise and 126 minutes in sunset. To assess whether cities experience peak hours at different official hours, we produced a variant of figure 1 that defines the time of each trip as a fraction of the time between local sunrise and sunset (or between local sunset and sunrise). It is virtually indistinguishable from figure 1.

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We finally turn to city effects. As argued above, we can interpret them as mobility index values. They measure (log) trip speed in cities after conditioning out log trip length and its square, log trip distance to the center and its square, and day and time of day effects. Figure 2 represents a kernel density estimate of the distribution of city fixed effects from column 5 of table 4. The standard deviation is 0.106. The slowest city is 28% slower than the mean while the fastest city is 42% faster. This gap of a factor of two between the slowest and fastest city is extremely large. Using traveler-reported data and a different methodology, Couture _et al._ (2018) find a less than 30% difference in travel speed among the largest 50 us metropolitan areas. The analogous figure for the top 50 in India is 80%. These large differences are unlikely to be due to sampling bias. All cities have at least 70,000 observations, and the largest cities have more than half a million.

Tables 5 and 6 report the 20 slowest and 10 fastest cities, respectively. First, we note that seven of the 10 largest cities by population in 2015 are among the 20 slowest. The three exceptions are Ahmadabad and Surat in Gujarat and Jaipur in Rajasthan. The state of Gujarat stands out in India for its innovative and more efficient urban planning practices (Annez, Bertaud, Bertaud, Bhatt, Bhatt, Patel, and Phata, 2016). The list of the 20 slowest cities also contains 6 cities from the state of Bihar (among 8 in our data). Bihar is the poorest state in India. Most of the other slow cities are from the neighboring states of Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, which are also among the five poorest states in India.

The list of the fastest cities is more heterogeneous. Many are small and in more developed parts of India. Others are exceptional in different ways. The fastest, Ranipet, is an independent city based on our delineation procedure. However, it may be viewed more meaningfully for our purposes as a suburb of the city of Vellore, located about 20 kilometers away. Chandigarh hosts a population above a million, but unlike most Indian cities, it is a planned city characterized by a regular grid pattern laid out by the French architect Le Corbusier.<sup>30</sup> Both Srinagar and Jammu, which are in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, receive specific infrastructure funding from the federal government and have a strong police presence. These two features may lead to better mobility.

Table 7 reports a number of variants of our benchmark specification in table 4 column 5. Column 1 uses log effective speed (haversine length divided by time) instead of actual

> 30Figure A.5 in the appendix shows Chandigarh’s road network, which has the most regular grid of all Indian cities in our sample.

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**Table 5:** Ranking of the 20 slowest cities, slowest at the top

|Rank|City|State|Index|
|---|---|---|---|
|1|Kolkata|West Bengal|-0.33|
|2|Bangalore|Karnataka|-0.25|
|3|Hyderabad|Andhra Pradesh|-0.25|
|4|Mumbai|Maharashtra|-0.24|
|5|Varanasi|Uttar Pradesh|-0.23|
|6|Patna|Bihar|-0.22|
|7|Delhi|Delhi|-0.22|
|8|Bhagalpur|Bihar|-0.22|
|9|Bihar Sharif|Bihar|-0.19|
|10|Chennai|Tamil Nadu|-0.17|
|11|Muzaffarpur|Bihar|-0.16|
|12|Aligarh|Uttar Pradesh|-0.15|
|13|Darbhanga|Bihar|-0.14|
|14|English Bazar|West Bengal|-0.14|
|15|Gaya|Bihar|-0.13|
|16|Allahabad|Uttar Pradesh|-0.13|
|17|Ranchi|Jharkhand|-0.12|
|18|Dhanbad|Jharkhand|-0.12|
|19|Akola|Maharashtra|-0.12|
|20|Pune|Maharashtra|-0.11|

_Notes:_ Mobility index is measured by the city effect estimated in column 5 of table 4.

**Table 6:** Ranking of the 10 fastest cities, fastest at the top

|Rank|City|State|Index|
|---|---|---|---|
|1|Ranipet|Tamil Nadu|0.35|
|2|Srinagar|Jammu and Kashmir|0.26|
|3|Kayamkulam|Kerala|0.24|
|4|Jammu|Jammu and Kashmir|0.23|
|5|Thrissur|Kerala|0.19|
|6|Palakkad|Kerala|0.16|
|7|Chandigarh|Chandigarh|0.16|
|8|Alwar|Rajasthan|0.15|
|9|Thoothukkudi|Tamil Nadu|0.15|
|10|Panipat|Haryana|0.15|

_Notes:_ Mobility index is measured by the city effect estimated in column 5 of table 4.

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**Table 7:** Determinants of log trip speed, variants

||(1)<br>effective <br>length|(2)<br> typical<br>traffc|(3)<br>no<br>traffc|(4)<br>off<br>peak|(5)<br>peak|(6)<br>high<br>peak|(7)<br>peak<br>radial|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|log trip length|-0.18<sup>_a_</sup>|0.13<sup>_a_</sup>|0.16<sup>_a_</sup>|0.14<sup>_a_</sup>|0.13<sup>_a_</sup>|0.13<sup>_a_</sup>|0.040|
||(0.012)|(0.012)|(0.012)|(0.011)|(0.013)|(0.012)|(0.030)|
|log trip length<sup>2</sup>|0.085<sup>_a_</sup><br>(0.0031)|0.017<sup>_a_</sup><br> (0.0039)|0.019<sup>_a_</sup><br> (0.0032)|0.019<sup>_a_</sup><br>(0.0031)|0.013<sup>_a_</sup><br>(0.0039)|0.0098<sup>_a_ </sup><br>(0.0034)|0.065<sup>_a_</sup><br>(0.010)|
|log distance to center|0.57<sup>_a_</sup>|0.16<sup>_a_</sup>|0.22<sup>_a_</sup>|0.23<sup>_a_</sup>|0.12<sup>_a_</sup>|0.087<sup>_b_</sup>|0.15<sup>_a_</sup>|
||(0.036)|(0.046)|(0.046)|(0.048)|(0.042)|(0.036)|(0.051)|
|log distance to center<sup>2 </sup>|-0.13<sup>_a_</sup>|0.014|-0.037|-0.047<sup>_c_</sup>|0.054<sup>_b_</sup>|0.083<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.12<sup>_a_</sup>|
||(0.015)|(0.026)|(0.025)|(0.027)|(0.023)|(0.019)|(0.044)|
|City effect|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|
|Day effect|weekd.|weekd.|weekd.|weekd.|weekd.|weekd.|weekd.|
|Time effect|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|Y|
|Weather|N|N|N|N|N|N|N|
|Observations|19,385,656|19,385,656|19,385,656|4,910,731|10,469,622|2,375,960|826,539|
|R-squared|0.34|0.56|0.54|0.54|0.54|0.53|0.54|
|Cities|154|154|154|154|154|154|154|

_Notes:_ OLS regressions with city, day, and time of day (for each 30 minute period) indicators. Log effective speed is the dependent variable in column 1. Log speed under “typical” traffic conditions is the dependent variable in column 2. Log speed under ‘no traffic’ is the dependent variable in column 3. Log speed is the dependent variable in all subsequent columns. All columns only consider weekday observations. Column 4 considers observation from only off-peak hours (before 7.30 and after 22.30). Column 5 considers observation from only peak hours (from 8.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. and from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.). Column 6 considers observations from only high peak hours (from 5.30 p.m. to 8 p.m.). Finally, column 7 considers only radial observation from peak and high peak hours (going towards the city center in the morning and back in the evening). Robust standard errors in parentheses. _a_ , _b_ , _c_ : significant at 1%, 5%, 10%.

speed as dependent variable. The increase in effective speed with trip length and with trip distance to the center is even more pronounced than the increase in actual speed. This is consistent with shorter and more central trips being more tortuous. Column 2 uses speed under “typical” traffic conditions as dependent variable; results are very similar to those for the corresponding specification using actual speed in column 5 of table 4. Column 3 uses the same to with no specification predict speed traffic. Interestingly, trips taking place further from the center remain faster. While figure 1 above suggests that central parts of Delhi are more the bulk of the difference in between more central and more congestible, speed peripheral trips remains in the absence of traffic. This is plausibly caused by the expected 22
greater density of intersections and narrower streets in more central parts of cities in India (and many other countries).

The second part of table 7 reports our preferred specification of table 4 for different times of day: off peak in column 4, peak in column 5, high peak in column 6, and radial trips at peak hours going towards the center in the morning and back towards the periphery in the afternoon in column 7. This last specification is meant to mimic archetypal commuting patterns. While again the curvature of the effect of trip length and distance to the center varies slightly, the results are generally very similar to those we obtained before.

# **_4.3 Comparing mobility indices_**

We now turn to comparing mobility indices. Because many different variants of equations (2) and (3) are available and many different samples of trips can be selected, many mobility indices are possible. To explore these possibilities, we compute a wide variety of such indices. To avoid hard-to-digest matrices of pairwise correlations, we form our benchmark mobility index from the city fixed effects estimated from the specification reported in column 5 of table 4, and compare all our other indices to this one. We also report the standard deviation, maximum and minimum of each variant. Standard deviations vary very little, except for the mean speed indices, which are constructed on a different (linear) scale.

The results are reported in table 8. Panel a compares our benchmark mobility index to the analogous indices estimated in the other columns of table 4 that includes various trip level controls. All these correlations are above 0.98 when we include the square of trip length and distance to center and fall to about 0.92 when we do not.

Panel b compares our benchmark index to the analogous indices estimated using the same specification but considering different types of trips separately. The correlations are again high. The lowest at 0.90 is with perhaps our most artificial type of trips, circumferential trips, and the highest is with perhaps our most realistic, amenity trips. Even indices based on our 17 individual amenity classes, which represent less than 3% of a city’s trips in nearly all cases, are highly correlated. Fifteen of them are correlated with the baseline index at 0.87 or higher. Finally, allowing time of day and weekend indicators to vary by trip type (radial inward, radial outward, circumferential, gravity, and 17 amenity types), so that, for example, trips to a temple on the weekend might be different than those on a weekday, also makes essentially no difference in rankings.

23
**Table 8:** Pairwise Spearman rank correlations with our benchmark mobility index

|Index|Corr.|Std. Dev.|Min|Max|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|Panel A: Columns from table 4|||||
|(1)|0.916|0.100|-0.232|0.332|
|(2)|>0.999|0.105|-0.321|0.347|
|(3)|0.992|0.108|-0.337|0.355|
|(4)<br>|0.918|0.101|-0.240|0.332|
|(6)|0.991|0.109|-0.347|0.356|
|(7)|0.983|0.115|-0.329|0.374|
|Panel B: Trip subsamples|||||
|Radial|0.926|0.117|-0.318|0.373|
|Circumferential|0.900|0.113|-0.286|0.330|
|Gravity|0.966|0.112|-0.375|0.308|
|Amenities|0.966|0.107|-0.345|0.373|
|Interact time/daywith triptype|>0.999|0.105|-0.322|0.347|
|Panel C: Mean speeds|||||
|Simple mean|0.476|3.790|16.212|34.903|
|Mean unweighted by length|0.619|2.899|15.7|31.4|
|<br>Mean of “typical” traffc speed|0.452|3.814|16.2|35.1|
|<br>Mean of uncongested speed|0.340|4.494|16.3|38.1|
|Mean effective speed|0.410|2.768|11.6|24.0|
|Panel D: Table 7 variants|||||
|Effective speed|0.864|0.118|-0.430|0.392|
|“Typical” traffc|0.997|0.102|-0.301|0.345|
|No traffc|0.850|0.100|-0.242|0.339|
|Fastest trip instance|0.851|0.101|-0.261|0.298|
|Off peak|0.881|0.099|-0.255|0.316|
|<br>Peak|0.991|0.113|-0.388|0.361|
|High peak|0.948|0.130|-0.430|0.367|
|<br>Peak radial|0.915|0.133|-0.450|0.405|
|Panel E: Full indices|||||
|Laspeyres|0.794|0.151|0.105|1.478|
|Paasche|0.941|0.107|0.767|1.478|
|Fisher|0.910|0.126|0.322|1.478|
|Logit/CES(_σ_=0)|0.923|0.098|0.675|1.255|
|Logit/CES(_σ_=2)|0.836|0.099|0.694|1.221|
|Logit/CES (_σ_=4)|0.687|0.108|0.648|1.182|
|Panel F: Distance to center|||||
|Trips within 5 km of center|0.970|0.108|-0.278|0.350|
|<br>Trips within 3 km of center|0.918|0.111|-0.268|0.356|
|Trips within 2 km of center|0.827|0.116|-0.261|0.336|
|Weight byinverse dist. to center|0.959|0.106|-0.293|0.341|
|Panel G: Weight by powered con|gestion|factor|||
|_λ_=0.2|0.910|0.137|-0.533|0.378|
|_λ_=0.3|0.927|0.123|-0.396|0.373|

_Notes:_ 154 cities in all rows except in the last row of panel A which uses 107. The first column reports the Spearman rank correlation between the index at hand and our preferred index from column 5 of table 4. The second column reports the standard deviation. The third and fourth column report the maximum and minimum respectively.

24
Next, panel c compares our benchmark index to various measures of mean speed computed above. The correlations are much lower than in the previous two panels. For instance, the correlation between our benchmark mobility index and mean speed computed as total travel length divided by total travel time is only 0.48. As noted in Couture _et al._ (2018) for us metropolitan areas, means of speed do not provide good descriptions of mobility in cities. This is because trip length, which varies systematically across locations, has a large explanatory power on trip speed. As a result, mean speeds are sensitive to sampling strategies, unlike our preferred mobility indices that control for trip length.

Panel d reports correlations between our benchmark mobility index and mobility indices computed from the estimations reported in table 7. The correlation of our benchmark mobility index with an index that measures speed using effective (haversine) rather than traveled trip length is 0.87. The 20 slowest cities reported in table 5 using our benchmark mobility index are all among the 30 slowest cities by effective speed. We can thus rule out the possibility that slow cities are more efficient at transporting travelers farther for the same number of straight line kilometers traveled. Slow cities are just slow.

Still in panel d, the correlation of our benchmark index with an uncongested mobility index, computed using travel times in the absence of traffic, is also relatively high at 0.85. This that is the outcome of slow travel. strongly suggests again poor mobility largely generally While congestion plays a role, it may not be the main driver of poor mobility in Indian cities. We return to this issue below. Interestingly, when ranking cities by uncongested mobility, we find that the five slowest cities in the absence of traffic are all in Bihar and 17 of the 20 slowest cities are in the poor northeastern part of India. Except for Kolkata which also ranks among the cities that are slow in the absence of traffic, most major Indian cities are in the middle of the distribution of uncongested mobility indices. For these cities, congestion is arguably an important determinant of why they are slow. Eight of the 10 fastest cities reported in table 6 are also among the 10 fastest cities in the absence of traffic.

The second part of panel d reports correlations between our benchmark index and mobility indices computed in the same manner as our benchmark but from observations taken at specific hours of the day. The correlation of our benchmark index with an index of peak-hour speed is extremely high. It is still high with an index computed only during the most extreme hours of the early evening, between 5.30 and 8 p.m., when traffic is generally at its slowest. The correlation is still 0.92 with an index computed using only the 5% of sample composed of radial trips at peak hours that go towards the center in the morning and away from the 25
center in the evening.

Panel e reports correlations between our benchmark index and more sophisticated Laspeyres, Paasche, Fisher, and logit/ces indices computed as described by equations (4), (5), and (6). Row 1 uses a Laspeyres index computed from the same specification as for our benchmark index which allows all 58 regression coefficients to vary across cities. The correlation is still fair at 0.79. It jumps to 0.89 when we focus only on the 50 largest cities. The lower full-sample correlation is due to flawed out-of-sample predictions in small cities for long trips far from the center. Row 4 to 6 reports correlations with the logit/ces index for different values of the elasticity of substitution _σ_ . The correlation for _σ_ = 0, the perfect complement case for which all trips receive equal weight, is very high at 0.92, and only declines slightly to 0.84 for _σ_ = 2. The correlation with our benchmark index remains relatively high at 0.69 even for an extreme value of _σ_ = 4, which gives a two-kilometer trip about 400 times the weight of a longer 15-kilometer trip.<sup>31</sup> In Appendix B, we describe simulations showing that correlations remain invariably high across a wide range of random quality draws _bci_ . In the same appendix, we describe mobility indices from models of travel demand with richer substitution patterns. These nested indices put less weight on destination types (e.g., shopping trips) that are relatively slower in a given city, because they allow travelers in each city to substitute away from costlier travel destination types. We find that such nested indices are correlated with our benchmark index. This further that our highly finding confirms benchmark index provides a robust characterization of travel cost differences across cities, because slow cities tend to be slow at all times, for all types of trip destinations, and across the city.

Panel f considers indices based on trips progressively closer to the center of the city. Correlations fall as expected, but even limiting to trips centered within 2 kilometers of the center, the correlation is still 0.83. Weighting trips close to the center more heavily, while including more peripheral trips, yields an index much more similar to the benchmark.

Finally, in panel g we try to weight each trip by how likely it is to be taken. Although this information is not directly available to us, we can use the implicit density of vehicles along the route as a proxy. To do so, we assume that (i) the speed of a trip instance is reduced from the maximum for that trip solely by congestion, (ii) the elasticity of trip speed with respect to the density of vehicles, _λ_ , is constant, and (iii) the density of vehicles is constant along 31Atkin, Faber, and Gonzalez-Navarro (2018) estimate an elasticity of substitution across retail stores slightly smaller than 4 for poor Mexican households. This is almost certainly an upper bound: the index considered here covers a much broader set of destinations that are unlikely to be as substitutable as retail stores.

26
the route. Under these assumptions, we can weight each trip _i_ by its length, _Di_ , times the implicit density of vehicles, ( _Ti_ / _Ti_<sup>_nt_)1/</sup><sup>_λ_.While these assumptions are unlikely to be strictly</sup> true, they manage to capture the fact that more vehicles slow down traffic and thus slower trip instances should receive a higher weight given that they represent more travelers. The question is of course which value to use for _λ_ . We use _λ_ = 0.2 and _λ_ = 0.3. The value _λ_ = 0.2 is a standard value in the traffic modelling literature (Small and Verhoef, 2007). The higher value _λ_ = 0.3 reduces the weight put on slow trips since slower speeds in India may not be caused only by more traffic. With both values, the indices are highly correlated with our benchmark index.

We draw two important conclusions from this analysis. First, because trip length is such an important determinant of trip speed, and because trip length varies across cities of different sizes, appropriately estimating a city mobility index requires accounting for trip-length differences. Second, we find that once trip length is conditioned out, the mobility indices that we estimate for each city are not sensitive to the exact sample being used, and therefore to the weight that different kinds of trips receive. Although we use a variety of trips that reflect important differences in traveller behavior, these differences do not appear to matter when estimating city mobility.

# **5. Decomposition: Uncongested mobility and congestion**

We first decompose our indices of mobility into mobility in the absence of traffic (uncongested mobility) and the congestion factor following equation (7). This relationship allows us to perform an exact variance decomposition. The variance of the mobility index is equal to the sum of three terms: the variance of the index of uncongested mobility, the variance of the congestion factor, and minus twice the covariance between the index of uncongested mobility and the congestion factor.

As shown in the first row of Table 9 Panel a, the variance of the uncongested mobility index accounts for 88% of the variance of our benchmark mobility index while that of the congestion factor accounts for only 32%. This is a striking finding. Differences in mobility between Indian cities are mostly driven by differences in their uncongested mobility, not by differences in how congested they are. As we show in the rest of this section, this finding is explained by both pervasive differences in uncongested mobility between cities and the fact that congestion remains modest in most cities. However, the finding is different when 27
**Table 9:** Variance decompositions of our baseline mobility index

|Sample|Cities||All trips|||Peak trips||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||U|ncongested<br>mobility|Congestion<br>factor|Covariance|Uncongested<br>mobility|Congestion<br>factor|Covariance|
|Panel A: Full tr|ip samp|le||||||
|All|154|0.884|0.318|0.101|0.769|0.451|0.110|
|Largest 50%|77|0.646|0.346|-0.004|0.534|0.479|0.006|
|Smallest 50%|77|1.305|0.126|0.215|1.346|0.170|0.258|
|Largest 25%|38|0.526|0.287|-0.093|0.427|0.393|-0.090|
|Largest 10%|15|0.357|0.376|-0.134|0.270|0.474|-0.128|
|Panel B: Distan|ce to cit|y center less|than 5 km|||||
|All|154|0.963|0.366|0.164|0.807|0.552|0.179|
|Largest 50%|77|0.746|0.424|0.085|0.579|0.618|0.099|
|Smallest 50%|77|1.293|0.123|0.208|1.335|0.170|0.253|
|Largest 25%|38|0.580|0.434|0.007|0.422|0.604|0.013|
|Largest 10%|15|0.487|0.748|0.117|0.300|0.899|0.100|
|Panel C: Distan|ce to cit|y center less|than 3 km|||||
|All|154|1.042|0.384|0.213|0.887|0.593|0.240|
|Largest 50%|77|0.829|0.421|0.125|0.657|0.634|0.145|
|Smallest 50%|77|1.300|0.129|0.215|1.342|0.178|0.260|
|Largest 25%|38|0.607|0.484|0.045|0.434|0.672|0.053|
|Largest 10%|15|0.639|0.880|0.259|0.388|1.060|0.224|
|Panel D: By trip|type|||||||
|Radial|154|0.960|0.369|0.164|0.821|0.534|0.178|
|Circumferentia|l 154|1.034|0.397|0.216|0.898|0.577|0.238|
|Gravity|154|0.789|0.223|0.006|0.700|0.312|0.006|
|Amenities|154|0.841|0.302|0.071|0.733|0.418|0.075|

we focus on the cities. These cities face similar but are largest fairly uncongested mobility congested to different degrees.

This said, a possible caveat here is that our data collection oversamples trips at night and this may bias our mobility index towards uncongested mobility. Performing the same exercise with indices computed only from trips taken at peak hours, we find that the uncongested mobility index still represents 77% of the variance of the mobility index during peak hours whereas the congestion factor represents only 45%.

We repeat the same exercise focusing on cities with population above the median. For these cities, the role of uncongested mobility falls, but remains larger than the congestion factor, 28
and the covariance term essentially goes to zero. For cities below the median population, the of the factor is low. For cities in the explanatory power congestion very top population quartile, the covariance term becomes negative, but the uncongested mobility still represents a larger share of the variance. Only in the top decile do the two factors have approximately even shares.

In the next two panels of Table 9, the role of congestion expands as we limit attention to city centers, especially at peak hours and in larger cities. Variance in uncongested mobility still however represents a substantial share of overall variance across cities in all samples. In the final panel, we repeat the same decomposition for each type of trip separately and find roughly similar results for the respective roles of uncongested mobility and congestion.

# **6. Correlation of mobility with city characteristics and urban development**

We now explain mobility using city characteristics. We first consider basic characteristics like population and area. We then consider indicators of urban economic development, such as income levels, car ownership rates, and urban population growth. In addition, we consider road network measures that reflect urban development, such as the availability of primary roads and conformity to a regular grid pattern. 10. Table 11 a and b re- We report results for our benchmark mobility index in table panels port the same specifications predicting the benchmark uncongested mobility and congestion indices, respectively. Because the mobility index is equal to the uncongested mobility index minus the congestion factor and we estimate the same specifications for all three dependent variables in each column, a given coefficient in table 10 is equal to the analogous coefficient in table 11 panel a minus the analogous coefficient in table 11 panel b.

In column 1 of table 10, we consider a simple specification with only log city population and log city area as explanatory variables. Because our dependent variable is a measure of log speed, we can interpret the coefficients as elasticities. For city population, we estimate an elasticity of -0.18. For city area, the elasticity is of opposite sign and equal to 0.15. These two variables explain more than half of the variation in mobility across Indian cities. Further controls added in subsequent columns change these results little. The robustness of these results is further confirmed in appendix tables C.2 and C.3 where we use alternative measures of mobility as dependent variables.

29
These results suggest a large “gross density” effect since an increase in population keeping land area constant is, in effect, an increase in population density. This large increase in the cost of travel per unit distance can be contrasted with the usually much smaller estimates of analogous density elasticities for measures of urban productivity such as wages (Combes and Gobillon, 2015). By contrast, this increase in the cost of travel when population density increases is comparable but somewhat smaller than the elasticity of urban costs with respect to density estimated by Combes, Duranton, and Gobillon (2016) for French cities. This elasticity of urban costs, which is estimated indirectly using housing prices at the center of cities, may reflect more than just slower mobility when density increases.

On the other hand, the mostly offsetting nature of the coefficients on population and urban land area suggest that “net scale” effects are small, once we allow for land area to adjust to a larger population. Consistent with this, we estimate an elasticity of about -0.05 when regressing our preferred mobility index on log city population alone.<sup>32</sup> In panels a and b of table 11, we estimate the same specifications as in table 10 using our preferred index of uncongested mobility and congestion factor as dependent variables. Consistent with our earlier decompositions of overall variance, we find that most of the effect of city population and city area on mobility works through uncongested mobility. For the congestion factor, we find an elasticity of city population of 0.02 in column 1. This coefficient remains between 0.02 and 0.03 in subsequent specifications. For the effect of city area on the congestion factor, we estimate small and insignificant elasticities in most specifications. Putting these results together, it appears that gross density mostly affects uncongested mobility while the negative net scale effects are mostly about congestion.

Column 2 of tables 10 and 11 adds the log of primary roads length. Here and in subsequent specifications, we estimate a small but robust elasticity of mobility with respect to primary road kilometers of about 0.01. We experimented with other measures of the roadway but failed to uncover other robust associations.<sup>33</sup> Interestingly, we find that the effect of primary

> 32We estimate a similar elasticity for us metropolitan areas using the preferred speed index computed by Couture _et al._ (2018). We nonetheless fail to replicate large gross density effects for us metropolitan areas when we also include log land area in the regression. This is perhaps because area is poorly measured by official definitions of metropolitan areas in the us. Couture _et al._ (2018) report a population elasticity of -0.12 when also conditioning out the roadway, perhaps because it more accurately reflects land area.

33Surprisingly, more motorways - which are high capacity dual carriage roads equivalent to freeways in the United States - do not lead to a robust improvement in mobility. We note that many Indian cities do not have any motorways in our sample. Couture _et al._ (2018) estimate a much larger roads coefficient for us metropolitan areas but do not condition out land area.

30
**Table 10:** Correlates of city mobility indices, benchmark mobility index

||(1)|(2)|(3)|(4)|(5)|(6)|(7)|(8)|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|log population|-0.18<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.18<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.17<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.17<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.17<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.17<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.17<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.16<sup>_a_</sup>|
||(0.016)|(0.015)|(0.016)|(0.017)|(0.016)|(0.018)|(0.016)|(0.017)|
|log area|0.15<sup>_a_</sup>|0.14<sup>_a_</sup>|0.13<sup>_a_</sup>|0.12<sup>_a_</sup>|0.12<sup>_a_</sup>|0.12<sup>_a_</sup>|0.12<sup>_a_</sup>|0.11<sup>_a_</sup>|
||(0.016)|(0.017)|(0.017)|(0.018)|(0.017)<br>|(0.019)|(0.017)|(0.019)|
|log roads||0.013<sup>_a_</sup>|0.012<sup>_a_</sup>|0.013<sup>_a_</sup>|0.011<sup>_b_</sup>|0.014<sup>_a_</sup>|0.013<sup>_a_</sup>|0.014<sup>_a_</sup>|
|||(0.0043)|(0.0043) <br>|(0.0040) <br>|(0.0044)|(0.0045) <br>|(0.0042) <br>|(0.0042)|
|log income|||0.22<sup>_b_</sup>|0.23<sup>_b_</sup>|0.20<sup>_c_</sup>|0.23<sup>_b_</sup>|0.22<sup>_b_</sup>||
||||(0.10)<br>|(0.10)<br>|(0.11)|(0.11)|(0.10)<br>||
|log<sup>2 </sup>income|||-0.064<sup>_b_</sup>|-0.066<sup>_b_</sup>|-0.055<sup>_c_</sup>|-0.064<sup>_c_</sup>|-0.065<sup>_b_</sup>||
||||(0.031)|(0.031)|(0.033)<br>|(0.034)|(0.032)||
|Network / shape||||0.26<sup>_a_</sup><br>(0.096)|0.11<sup>_b_</sup><br>(0.049)|0.055<sup>_c_</sup><br>(0.029)|||
|Pop. growth 90-10|||||||0.052<sup>_c_</sup><br>(0.030)||
|share w. car||||||||0.21<br>(0.14)<br>|
|share w. motorcycle||||||||0.11<sup>_b_</sup><br>(0.054)|
|Observations|153|153|153|153|153|142|153|152|
|R-squared|0.54|0.56|0.57|0.59|0.58|0.60|0.58|0.59|

_Notes:_ OLS regressions with a constant in all columns. The dependent variable is the city fixed effect estimated in the specification reported in column 5 of table 4. Robust standard errors in parentheses. _a_ , _b_ , _c_ : significant at 1%, 5%, 10%. Log population is constructed from town populations from the 2011 census. Log roads is log kilometers of primary roads within the city-light. Income is measured with male earnings from the 2011 census. The network / shape variable used in column 4 measures the share of edges in the road network that conform to the grid’s main orientation, i.e., whose compass bearing is within 2 degrees of the modulo 90 modal bearing in the network. The network / shape variable in column 5 is a Gini index for the distribution of edge compass bearings in the road network. It also measures how grid-like the city is. The network / shape variable used in column 6 uses Harari’s (2016) measure of the average distance between the centroid of the city and all the points that define its periphery. It measures the compactness of the city. The measure of population growth between 1990 and 2010 was constructed UN data. The share of households with access to a car or to a motorcycle is from the 2011 census.

roads on mobility mostly occurs through uncongested mobility while the effect of primary roads on the congestion factor is a precisely estimated zero. We think these findings reflect two facts. First, primary roads are intrinsically faster than secondary or tertiary roads. Second, the absence of an effect on the congestion factor is consistent with the fundamental law of congestion: more primary roads attract new traffic and eventually leave congestion unchanged (Duranton and Turner, 2011). We return to this issue below.

31
**Table 11:** Correlates of city mobility indices, uncongested mobility and congestion factor

||(1)|(2)|(3)|(4)|(5)|(6)|(7)|(8)|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Panel A: Uncongeste|d mobili|ty|||||||
|log population|-0.16<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.15<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.15<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.14<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.14<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.15<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.14<sup>_a_</sup>|-0.13<sup>_a_</sup>|
||(0.017)|(0.016)|(0.015)|(0.016)|(0.015)|(0.017)|(0.014)|(0.017)|
|log area|0.17<sup>_a_</sup>|0.15<sup>_a_</sup>|0.13<sup>_a_</sup>|0.13<sup>_a_</sup>|0.13<sup>_a_</sup>|0.14<sup>_a_</sup>|0.13<sup>_a_</sup>|0.11<sup>_a_</sup>|
||(0.017)|(0.017)|(0.018)|(0.018)|(0.017)|(0.019)|(0.017)|(0.020)|
|log roads||0.013<sup>_a_</sup>|0.013<sup>_a_</sup>|0.014<sup>_a_</sup>|0.012<sup>_b_</sup>|0.015<sup>_a_</sup>|0.015<sup>_a_</sup>|0.017<sup>_a_</sup>|
|||(0.0050)|(0.0049)|(0.0045)|(0.0050)|(0.0053)|(0.0044)|(0.0045)|
|log income|||0.15<sup>_c_</sup><br>|0.15<sup>_c_</sup><br>|0.13<br>|0.14<br>|0.14<br>||
||||(0.084)|(0.083)|(0.089)|(0.093)|(0.086)||
|log<sup>2 </sup>income|||-0.026|-0.029|-0.022|-0.023|-0.029||
||||(0.026)|(0.025)|(0.027)|(0.028)|(0.026)||
|Network / shape||||0.21<sup>_c_</sup>|0.047|0.020|||
|||||(0.11)|(0.063)|(0.032)|||
|Pop. growth 90-10|||||||0.11<sup>_a_</sup><br>(0.030)||
|share w. car||||||||0.55<sup>_a_</sup><br>(0.14)|
|share w. motorcycle||||||||0.016<br>(0.051)|
|R-squared|0.43|0.45|0.48|0.50|0.49|0.50|0.53|0.53|
|Panel B: Congestion|factor||||||||
|log population|0.024<sup>_b_</sup>|0.024<sup>_b_</sup>|0.026<sup>_a_</sup>|0.025<sup>_a_</sup>|0.024<sup>_b_</sup>|0.023<sup>_b_</sup>|0.029<sup>_a_</sup>|0.030<sup>_a_</sup>|
||(0.0096)|(0.0096)|(0.0095)|(0.0097)|(0.0099)|(0.010)|(0.0095)|(0.0098)|
|log area|0.018<sup>_b_</sup>|0.017<sup>_c_</sup>|0.0071|0.0084|0.0096|0.011|0.0044|0.0068|
||(0.0086)|(0.0095)|(0.010)|(0.011)|(0.011)|(0.011)|(0.010)|(0.011)|
|log roads||0.00068|0.00094|0.00068|0.0017|0.00081|0.0017|0.0028|
|||(0.0028)|(0.0029)|(0.0029)|(0.0029)|(0.0031)|(0.0027)|(0.0028)|
|log income|||-0.079|-0.080|-0.064|-0.091|-0.081||
||||(0.060)|(0.060)|(0.061)|(0.065)|(0.057)||
|log<sup>2 </sup>income|||0.037<sup>_b_</sup>|0.038<sup>_b_</sup>|0.032<sup>_c_</sup>|0.041<sup>_b_</sup>|0.036<sup>_b_</sup>||
||||(0.019)|(0.019)|(0.019)|(0.020)|(0.018)||
|Network / shape||||-0.046<br>(0.045)|-0.061<sup>_c_</sup><br>(0.035)|-0.035<sup>_b_</sup><br>(0.016)|||
|Pop. growth 90-10|||||||0.054<sup>_a_</sup><br>(0.018)||
|share w. car||||||||0.34<sup>_a_</sup><br>(0.091)|
|share w. motorcycle||||||||-0.096<sup>_b_</sup><br>(0.042)|
|R-squared|0.54|0.54|0.60|0.60|0.61|0.61|0.63|0.63|
|Observations|153|153|153|153|153|142|153|152|

_Notes:_ OLS regressions with a constant in all columns. The dependent variable is the city fixed effect estimated for uncongested mobility in panel A, and the congestion factor in panel B. Robust standard errors in parentheses. _a_ , _b_ , _c_ : significant at 1%, 5%, 10%. See the footnote of table 10 for further details about the explanatory variables.

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Column 3 of table 10 further includes log city income and its square.<sup>34</sup> We find evidence of a hill shape where mobility first increases with income and then declines. The turning point corresponds to a city slightly below the top quartile of income. This finding is consistent with our rankings of the fastest and slowest cities in tables 5 and 6. Many of the fastest are middle-income cities, while the slowest are either among the poorest or richest cities in the country. When we examine the separate effects of income on uncongested mobility and the congestion factor in table 11 we find that the overall shape of the income-mobility relationship reflects two opposing forces. Uncongested mobility improves with income, perhaps because of better roads. The congestion factor also increases with income, perhaps as residents have more vehicles and travel more. This second force appears to kick in at higher levels of income as evidenced by the fact that it is captured by the squared log income term in the regression. This is also consistent with our earlier findings that congestion is important in only a small number of cities.

In columns 4 and 5 of table 10, we consider two different measures of how well the road network of a city conforms to a regular grid.<sup>35</sup> Both measures suggest a positive association between a more grid-like pattern and better mobility in cities. The magnitude of the coefficients reported in the table for these measures is hard to interpret directly. A normalization indicates that a standard deviation in our grid variable is associated with 0.16 (in column 4) or 0.11 (in column 5) standard deviation in log mobility. This finding provides preliminary evidence in support of calls for more regular grid patterns for the roadway of emerging cities (Angel, 2008, Fuller and Romer, 2014).

We also experimented with the measures of urban form constructed by Harari (2016) and found a robust association between mobility and her measure of urban sprawl. The results are reported in column 6. That more sprawl is positively correlated with mobility is consistent with earlier results by Glaeser and Kahn (2004) for the us.

In column 7 of tables 10 and 11, we introduce a measure of past population growth. Cities that experienced faster population growth between 1990 and 2010 enjoy both faster uncongested mobility and more congestion. Overall the positive effect happening through 34Our income measure is log daily earnings for men. Since it is measured at the district level, it is subject to substantial measurement error. We exclude women due to lower labor force participation.

> 35The first measure captures the share of edges in the network that conform to the grid’s main orientation i.e., whose compass bearing is within 2 degrees of the modulo 90 modal bearing in the network. The second measure is a Gini index for the distribution of edge compass bearings. Appendix A provides details. We also experimented with measures of the density of intersections and the length and circuitry of road segments but failed to uncover any robust association with our measures of mobility.

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to dominate. While we leave a of these uncongested mobility appears deeper investigation results for future research, we emphasize that they are inconsistent with typical claims that rapid urban population growth in developing countries is necessarily associated with worse worsen with but this effect is more mobility. Congestion may population growth negative than offset by faster roads.

in column 8 we no consider income but instead introduce two measures Finally, longer for the share of population with access to a car (or equivalent) and (separately) a motorcycle. The insignificant positive coefficient for cars in explaining mobility in table 10 results from two offsetting effects where more cars are strongly and positively associated with both un11. congested mobility and congestion in table Motorcycles are associated with faster travel via less congestion, consistent with them taking up less room than cars, but inconsistent with them a to causal is our here being response congestion. Again, identification beyond scope but we would like to highlight that standard indicators of urban economic development such as higher incomes, faster population growth, and more cars are generally associated with better mobility outcomes despite higher congestion.

Although our findings above are generally stable across a wide variety of specifications, they may be subject to bias due to omitted city-level variables. In results reported in Appendix D, we control for city fixed effects, using within-city variation in population, area, and roads, at the level of concentric rings (0 to 2 kilometers from the center, 2 to 5, 5 to 10, 10 to 15, and 15 and beyond) to gain further insights about variation in mobility. Within cities, rings with more population and less urban area are slower, just as in the across-city results above.

# **7. Transit and walking**

While roughly half the households in the average city in our data have access to a private vehicle – sometimes a car but more often a motorcycle – we recognize that city dwellers in India also often walk and use transit. To investigate these two alternative modes of travel, we also collected travel time data for walking and transit for all our trip instances.

For walking trips, speeds typically do not vary much across our trips and remain constant within trip. Mean walking speed is 4.8 kilometers/hour with a standard deviation of 0.1 kilometers/hour. We first estimate a city effect for walking trips in the same spirit as our baseline mobility index above. The standard deviation for the city effects is unsurprisingly 34
tiny at 0.006. When we try to explain city effects for walking trip using the same approach as in table 10, the only robust correlate of our walking mobility index is a measure of average slope in the city. As Google Maps’ algorithm reflects, steeper slopes slow down walking.

As described in Appendix A, we also collected transit data. These data have two important limitations. Google Maps only appears to return transit information for formal transit, and it bases its information on official timetables. This ignores informal transit and delays or missed services in formal transit. With these caveats in mind, we first note that only about 20% of our trip instances have a transit alternative that we define as ‘viable’: it requires less than an hour wait, and is strictly faster than walking. Despite this selection, viable transit trips take on average 2.3 times as long as trips with private vehicles. In regressions not reported here, we additionally find that unsurprisingly, the transit time penalty is higher for shorter trips, trips further from the center, and nighttime trips.

Next, for 141 cities we can estimate an index analogous to our baseline mobility index for transit. Unlike with walking, there is a lot of cross-city variation for transit. The standard deviation for our transit mobility index is about twice that of our baseline mobility index for private vehicles. This variation does not seem to be due to sampling problems as these indices are precisely estimated and alternative transit indices are all highly correlated.

The correlation between our mobility index for transit and our baseline mobility index (for private vehicles) is extremely low at 0.02. This correlation even becomes negative when we focus on the largest cities. However, when we re-estimate our mobility index for private vehicles on a sample limited to trip instances for which a viable transit alternative is possible, this correlation increases from 0.02 to 0.17. This difference suggests a fair amount of selection regarding which trip instances have a viable transit alternative known to Google. To confirm the low correlation between transit and vehicle travel times we regress log transit travel time on log private vehicle travel time and log walking time. In this regression, the coefficient on log vehicle travel time is only 0.19 while the coefficient on log walking time, which is essentially a measure of trip length, is 0.52.

Finally, we also replicated the regressions of table 10 for our transit mobility index. We did not find any robust correlates of transit mobility at the city level. Given the sizable variation across cities in transit mobility, this may seem surprising. Nonetheless, this result is consistent with the weak correlation between (private vehicle) mobility and transit mobility. Although we must remain cautious given the caveats that apply to our transit data, taken together these results suggest to us to that transit mobility depends much more on the coverage and 35
frequency of transit than on driving speeds.

# **8. Conclusions**

We propose a novel approach to measuring vehicular mobility within cities, and decomposing it into uncongested mobility and a congestion factor. We apply it using novel large scale data on counterfactual trips in 154 Indian cities collected from Google Maps. After showing that various sampling and estimation strategies yield similar estimates of mobility, we document a number of important facts about mobility in Indian cities. Among the most important, we first highlight large mobility differences across cities. Second, slow mobility is primarily due to cities being slow all the time rather than congested at peak hours. We do nonetheless find an important role for congestion in the largest cities, especially close to their centers. Third, several city attributes are consistently correlated with mobility and its components. We find that population and land area are key correlates of city mobility. A larger population leads to slower uncongested mobility as well as more congestion. We also find that both recent population growth and a measure of cars per capita are positively associated with uncongested mobility but also with congestion. More primary roads and a more regular grid-pattern are associated with moderately faster mobility. Higher income cities have higher uncongested mobility, but also higher congestion, leading to a hill-shaped relationship between income and overall mobility. Overall, these indicators of urban economic are associated with better worse development mobility despite congestion, contrary to a conventional wisdom that urban growth and development condemns developing cities to complete gridlock. While in principle, variation in uncongested mobility could be due to many city attributes beyond those we consider here in our regressions, such as the state of the vehicle stock or driving culture, we interpret it as being primarily due to the quality of the road network. Most old cars can be driven 45 kilometers per hour (the 99th percentile of our trip speed distribution), and Google Maps’ algorithm is likely to pick out a high moment of the block speed distribution in order to distinguish motorized from non-motorized vehicles.

We that this set of evidence on urban and in a hope first cross-city mobility congestion developing country can help guide policy and future research. We now review three of our findings that have research and policy implications. First, we document that congestion in India is not a nationwide problem, but rather is highly concentrated near the center of the largest Indian cities. Given their importance to the Indian economy, these areas with the 36
highest levels of congestion, such as the center of Kolkota and Bangalore, should be the focus of policy effort to alleviate congestion, and of future research to identify the most effective policies, as in Kreindler (2018).

Second, we compared travel patterns in India with those from more developed cities, and we uncovered important differences. In particular, Indian cities do not experience the familiar twin due to and commutes. There is almost no peak congestion patterns morning evening distinct morning peak, and instead a slow buildup of congestion that often persists until late into the rainfall to These evening. Light appears speed up traffic slightly. unique patterns are consistent with Indian roads being multi-purpose public goods serving a wide variety of uses other than motorized transport that slow down travel. If this conjecture is correct, then further research on technologies and policies for separating roadway uses appears especially promising, with appropriate consideration for the costs of restricting non-vehicle uses. More generally, our findings of unique Indian travel patterns imply that country-specific policies are necessary, and that using our data sources and methodology to study other countries individually may uncover distinctive patterns.

Third, our most surprising and perhaps controversial finding is that in most Indian cities travel is slow at all times, not just peak times. As a result, standard policy recommendations like congestion pricing, hov lanes, or other types of travel restrictions may do little to improve mobility. Instead, potentially costly travel infrastructure may be the only way to improve uncongested mobility. Our paper provides a first set of results suggesting a modest positive role for the design of a regular network grid and the presence of more primary roads. We hope that future research and engineering studies can identify cost-effective ways to build faster urban networks. On an optimistic note we find that better uncongested mobility generally correlates with the process of economic development. Unfortunately, this relationship is neither perfect nor linear.

We believe a lot more can be learned from the data we use here. In an extension of this paper (Akbar _et al._ , 2018), we provide complementary measures of urban accessibility in Indian cities, decompose accessibility into proximity and mobility, and provide an analysis of the urban correlates of accessibility and proximity. This sort of data can thus be used to learn about the fundamentals of urban travel beyond mobility and congestion. It can also potentially play an important role in our understanding of patterns of land use and property prices in cities in relation to transportation. Relative to more traditional travel surveys, the information used here is less complete but can be gathered at a small fraction of the cost, 37
hundreds of dollars instead of tens of millions for full travel survey. The type of data we used here is also much more versatile and can thus be at narrower issues or areas targeted without fear of losing statistical power. It can also be collected at much higher frequency than the typical 5 to 8 year gap between consecutive traditional travel surveys.

This type of data is also particularly interesting to evaluate the effects of policy changes in the short-run. For instance, Kreindler (2016) uses a data collection comparable to ours for Delhi to examine the short-term congestion benefits of a new driving restriction based on vehicle plate numbers. Hanna _et al._ (2017) use a similar strategy to assess the effects of the relaxation of a high-occupancy vehicle constraint on certain major arteries in Jakarta. We believe these studies and future studies of this type will shed useful light on many aspects of transportation policy in cities. Many other possible applications are possible. They include, for instance, the monitoring of city recovery after major natural disasters.

We also hope that more data underlying the production of real-time travel information will be made available for research. The data that we use allow us to learn about mobility, and the price (time cost) of travel for all possible trips at all times. The analogous quantities (i.e., number of travelers) are potentially knowable from the same underlying data. With both prices and quantities, the detailed study of congestion, both on particular road segments and in larger areas, will be possible. Repeated observations of the same travelers would also enable a much better analysis of individual travel behavior. For instance, Kreindler (2018) uses a panel of trip-level data for 2,000 commuters from a smartphone app to learn about individual response to peak travel congestion, and to measure the welfare impact of various pricing policies to alleviate congestion in Bangalore. With appropriate regard for privacy, the availability of larger trip-level samples across cities would allow for a comprehensive analysis of the welfare consequences of better urban mobility and accessibility.

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