Traffic Congestion in Big Cities

Traffic congestion is one of the main problems in big cities like London, New York, Copenhagen, and Delhi. The primary causes of it are high population and movement of people. With progress in engineering, humanity invents many initiatives to solve this problem. One of the that is public transport area, particularly Metro. The Metro is an underground railway system of the city. According to Business Traveler (2012) the oldest subway was built in London in 1836 and to date the London Metro is the first in the ten top metros of the world. Ahead 2012, in top ten metros of the world there were included subways of Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Berlin, and Tokyo after the London Metro respectively. The focus of this essay is an evaluating of the effectiveness of underground railway systems in reducing traffic congestion. In order to properly assess the efficiency of metro it is necessary to find, describe, and analyze the transport impact of the metro on car and bus traffic growth and evaluate city traffic in the near and distant future after building a metro.
The initiative of building underground railway system has a positive influence on car traffic congestion. According to Advani (2005) 20% of trips of cars, taxis, and other personal vehicles with an average length of 11.5 km were shifted to the metro after the opening of the new subway stations in Delhi in 1994. The city movement by car has some difficulties like traffic jams and parking. Therefore some people prefer the metro rather than own car to avoid these difficulties; moreover building of the metro gives possibilities to car travelers for both short and long trips to be shifted to the underground. In addition it can induce to change peoples’ behavior in favor of the metro and public transport in general. Vuk (2006) reports that car traffic started decreasing after the subway opening in Copenhagen, and continue shift to the metro due to developing subway system. Hence the increase of subway usage contributes to