The best way to get around India? By train. Most Indians can afford it, its reasonably fast, its reasonably comfortable and its really cheap. If its not cheap enough you can get on for free and hide in the bathroom.
So here's a thought. Instead of spending billions on road development, lets leave the roads the way they are and focus on railways. This the transportation of the future. What we need is better railcars, more rail tracks and privatisation. Yes the magic P word.
Let the government continue to run the railways it has now and develop new lines. But let private guys also run trains on these lines. Just like the private plane operators have come in. In the early days, there was Indian express and nobody else. There were government airports and nothing else. The government continues to run the airports but private players can also use these and Indian express continues unabated (albeit with fatter air hostesses who frown at you from their union protected towers).
However much the government invests it can never match the efficiencies that come from competition among private players.
Within the cities lets invest in bus only routes and metro's. No matter how many highways, over bridges, ring roads or flyovers you build you can never keep pace with the number of cars getting on the road. So the best thing to do is to abandon the idea of keeping pace with the number of private cars and focus on building up a superb public transportation system. Private and public buses. A metro system for any city with over 2 lakh people and a concentrated urban center. Special bus roads. And high taxes on cars.
If you do this in 20 years you'll end up with ppl buying and using fewer private vehicles. More ppl using public transportation. Less pollution. Less traffic jams. Shorter, safer, commutes.
