Zoho's Sridhar Vembu shares ideal formula to solve Bengaluru, Mumbai traffic woes, and it's hidden in towns like Nagpur, Kanpur

As Bengaluru and Mumbai struggles its way through traffic jams, Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu took to his social media to speak about the idea population size of Indian cities to solve India's big traffic crisis.

As per the founder, Vembu said that cities with population of 1 lakh to 2 lakh people would be ideal to make public transport in cities work. According to Census 2011, the solution would work for places like Nagpur, Kanpur, Lucknow, Indore that have a population in the bracket given by the founder.

In India, three cities—Kolkata, Bengaluru, and Pune—featured in the top five globally for the slowest average speeds. London, the first European city on the list, ranked fifth. Other top congested cities in India are Hyderabad, Chennai, and Mumbai, with average travel times of 32 minutes, 30 minutes, and 29 minutes for a 10 km journey, respectively, according to the Tom Tom Traffic index.


Check full text:
On our big city traffic woes. Extraordinary investment in public transport is required to make our cities work. That brings up a fundamental issue: I believe the investment required *per capita* to support high density scales with the population (that leads to total investment growing as the square of the population ).

Ultimately this sets a mathematical upper limit on how big cities can get. To state it differently, much of the extra GDP arising from such extremely large cities goes to feed the sophisticated infrastructure. This naturally raises the cost of living and that, combined with lack of space, lowers fertility.

Japan tried the hardest to keep up with the infrastructure needed for scaling cities (34 million people in greater Tokyo!) and the result is extreme public debt as well as extremely poor demographics. There is a size of city that is "optimal" in that sense, and that is probably about 100K to 250K people (yes, we think of them as "towns"!).

At that size, you get the clustering benefits of urbanization without the extraordinary infrastructure tax. Now you know where our offices tend to be located and why!

How did people react?
"Brilliant thread. Totally agree, scaling infrastructure in big cities isn’t linear. As population grows, costs rise disproportionately, often eating up the GDP gains. Japan is a perfect example: world-class infrastructure, but huge debt and demographic decline. The 100K–250K city size is underrated, offers urban benefits without the infrastructure burden. Smart move placing offices there. Decentralized, human-scale cities might just be the future," said one user.

"Amongst other reasons, is also one which is ignored the most - road design. One can clearly see in the video frame how the traffic is held up due to vehicles taking a right turn. Exit / merging from / to main road can also be seen as a contributor to the traffic jam," said another user.