Key Indicators of Transport System Performance in Urban India

Every Indian city tells a story through its streets. The crawl of traffic on a Bengaluru flyover, the gap where a footpath should be in Delhi, the crush inside a Mumbai local at 9 am, all of these are data points. To make sense of them, urban planners rely on transport system indicators: measurable signals that reveal how well a city moves its people. These indicators turn vague complaints like “the traffic is terrible” into numbers that can be tracked, compared, and improved. Understanding them is the first step toward fixing the urban mobility crisis that most cities now face.

What transport system indicators actually measure
Core indicators for urban transport
Average travel speed
Walkability
Cycle-ability
Emission rates
Public transit share and why it matters
The current picture in Indian cities
How share connects to efficiency and sustainability
Safety indicators
The fatality index
Pedestrian and cyclist fatality rates
On-street parking as a safety and efficiency indicator
Reading the indicators together

What transport system indicators actually measure

A transport indicator is a metric that captures one specific aspect of how a transport system performs. No single number can describe an entire city’s mobility, so planners use a set of indicators that together build a complete picture. The Ministry of Urban Development laid out a structured version of this approach through its Service Level Benchmarks for Urban Transport, a framework that cities are expected to use when preparing mobility plans and applying for central funding.

These benchmarks group indicators across themes like public transport availability, pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, travel speed, road safety, and parking. The logic is simple. If you cannot measure something, you cannot manage it. A city that does not track its average commute speed or its pedestrian fatality rate has no way of knowing whether its policies are working. Indicators give planners a feedback loop.

Core indicators for urban transport

Several metrics form the backbone of any transport assessment. Each one looks at the system from a different angle, and read together, they expose where a city is succeeding and where it is failing its residents.

Average travel speed

Average speed measures how fast vehicles actually move on city roads, usually during peak hours when congestion is worst. It is one of the most telling indicators because it directly reflects congestion levels. A study reviewing 154 Indian cities found that the mean travel speed was 24.4 kmph, with the slowest city at 16.2 kmph and the fastest at 34.9 kmph. Kolkata emerged as the slowest, and Bengaluru as the most congested.

The trend is worrying. Research warns that average peak-hour speeds could fall sharply by 2030 as more private vehicles flood the roads. Lower speeds mean longer commutes, higher fuel consumption, and more emissions. The Service Level Benchmarks even define poor performance in terms of speed: when average travel speed drops to roughly one-third of the free-flow speed, the corridor is rated at its worst service level.

Walkability

Walkability measures how safe, comfortable, and convenient it is to travel on foot. This matters enormously because a large share of Indians already walk. According to Census 2011 data cited in transport research, around 36 percent of Indians walk or cycle to work, and over half rely on non-motorised transport for at least part of their commute. Despite this, footpaths are often missing, broken, or occupied by parked vehicles and vendors.

To quantify walkability, the Ministry of Urban Development developed a benchmarking tool that rates pedestrian facilities using three measures: signalised intersection delay per pedestrian, street lighting levels, and the percentage of the city covered with footpaths wider than 1.2 metres. These factors decide whether walking is a genuine option or a daily hazard.

Cycle-ability

Cycle-ability assesses how friendly a city is to bicycles. Cycling is clean, cheap, and ideal for short trips, yet most Indian cities lack dedicated cycle lanes. Indicators here include the presence of segregated cycle tracks, safe bicycle parking, and the share of the road network with non-motorised transport facilities. Research on tier-II cities like Bhopal notes that bicycles compete well with other modes for trips up to 1.5 km, which makes cycle infrastructure a high-value investment for short urban journeys.

Government programmes have tried to push this forward. The Smart Cities Mission ran initiatives such as Cycle4Change and Transport4All to improve the cycling ecosystem, but implementation has been uneven, and funding still favours heavy road infrastructure over cycle tracks.

Emission rates

Emission rate measures the pollution generated by the transport sector, usually counted as greenhouse gases and particulate matter. Transport is a major contributor to the toxic air that now blankets Indian cities each winter. The link between mobility and air quality is direct: in 2022, the air quality indices for Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai were rated hazardous, very unhealthy, and unhealthy respectively.

This indicator drives much of modern transport policy. The reason planners want to shift people from private cars to buses and trains is largely about cutting emissions per passenger. A single bus carrying many passengers produces a fraction of the per-person emissions of a car carrying one or two people, which is exactly why the next indicator matters so much.

Public transit share, often called modal share, is the percentage of all trips in a city made using buses, metro, suburban rail, and other mass transit. It is arguably the single most important indicator of a transport system’s health, because a high public transport share usually means lower emissions, less congestion, and more efficient use of road space.

The current picture in Indian cities

The numbers reveal a system under strain. On average, the public transport modal share is only about 25 percent across Indian cities, while intermediate public transport such as shared autos adds another 10 percent. Personal vehicles dominate the rest. There is wide variation between cities. An analysis of mega cities found that public transport dependence ranges from 14 percent in Hyderabad to 36.8 percent in Kolkata, with Mumbai and Bengaluru also showing relatively high shares.

What concerns planners is the direction of travel. Even where buses and metros exist, their share is shrinking in many cities as households buy more cars and two-wheelers. Bus modal shares alone vary dramatically, from as low as 3 percent in Surat to 43 percent in Bangalore.

National policy guidelines set ambitious targets for this indicator. They recommend that cities with a population of one million should aim for a public transit modal share of 40 to 45 percent, and that cities of five million should serve 75 percent of their travel demand through public transport. Most cities fall well short.

The gap matters because public transit share is tightly linked to the other indicators. When share rises, average speeds tend to improve as fewer private vehicles clog the roads. Emissions fall because mass transit moves more people per unit of fuel. Road safety often improves too, since fewer two-wheelers on the road means fewer of the most vulnerable users exposed to risk. This is why planners treat modal share not as one metric among many, but as a lever that moves the entire system.

Safety indicators

A transport system that moves people quickly but kills them in the process is not effective. Safety indicators measure how well a city protects its road users, and on this front India faces one of its most serious challenges.

The fatality index

The fatality index, typically expressed as road deaths per lakh of population, is the headline safety indicator. The Service Level Benchmarks set the target bluntly: the benchmark for the fatality rate is zero, meaning the goal is to eliminate road deaths entirely. The reality is far from that. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways reported that 172,890 people died in road accidents in 2023, the highest figure ever recorded, translating to roughly 20 deaths every hour.

The data also identifies who is most at risk. Two-wheeler riders made up 44.8 percent of fatalities, while pedestrians accounted for 20.4 percent. These vulnerable road users, the people the benchmarks specifically want cities to protect, bear the heaviest burden. Although urban roads form only a small slice of the total network, they account for a disproportionate share of fatalities because that is where vehicles and pedestrians collide most often.

Pedestrian and cyclist fatality rates

Because pedestrians and cyclists are so exposed, the benchmarks track their fatality rate as a separate indicator. The figures are stark. Pedestrian deaths rose to 35,221 in 2023, up 7.3 percent from the previous year. In some cities the share is even higher. In Ahmedabad, pedestrians accounted for 44 percent of all road fatalities in 2023, with speeding implicated in the vast majority of cases. This indicator exposes a design failure: streets built for vehicle speed rather than human safety.

On-street parking as a safety and efficiency indicator

On-street parking might seem like a minor concern, but it is a revealing indicator of how a city manages its road space. The Service Level Benchmarks measure parking through the availability of paid public parking spaces and the restriction of free parking. The thinking is that unlimited free parking encourages car ownership and lets vehicles occupy space meant for footpaths and cycle tracks.

When vehicles park on streets, they narrow the carriageway, slow traffic, and push pedestrians into the path of moving vehicles. Illegally occupied public space, whether by parked cars, hawkers, or shops, is itself tracked as an indicator of how much road is genuinely available for safe movement. Managing parking through pricing is also one of the most effective ways to nudge commuters away from private vehicles. Research on Delhi suggests that revising on-street and off-street parking pricing could meaningfully reduce private vehicle use and shift trips toward public transit. In this way, a parking indicator connects directly back to modal share, speed, and emissions.

Reading the indicators together

The real value of these metrics appears when they are read as a system rather than in isolation. A falling average speed, a shrinking public transit share, rising emissions, and climbing pedestrian fatalities are not separate problems. They are symptoms of the same underlying shift toward private vehicle dependence. A city that improves its public transit share will usually see gains across speed, safety, and air quality at once.

This is why planners and bodies like the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs insist on comprehensive benchmarking rather than chasing one number. Indicators are diagnostic tools. They tell a city not just that something is wrong, but where the intervention will do the most good. For a country urbanising as rapidly as India, getting these measurements right is the foundation for building cities that move people safely, cleanly, and efficiently.

What do you think? If your own city could improve only one transport indicator over the next five years, which one would deliver the biggest change to daily life: faster average speeds, a higher public transit share, or lower pedestrian fatalities? And what does the way your neighbourhood handles footpaths and on-street parking tell you about whose movement the city actually prioritises?

References

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Key Indicators of Transport System Performance in Urban India

Table of Contents

What transport system indicators actually measure 🔗

Core indicators for urban transport 🔗

Average travel speed 🔗

Walkability 🔗

Cycle-ability 🔗

Emission rates 🔗

Public transit share and why it matters 🔗

The current picture in Indian cities 🔗

How share connects to efficiency and sustainability 🔗

Safety indicators 🔗

The fatality index 🔗

Pedestrian and cyclist fatality rates 🔗

On-street parking as a safety and efficiency indicator 🔗

Reading the indicators together 🔗