Vehicles Idle More Than 20% of the Time in Delhi

An IIT-Delhi study has revealed that vehicles in the capital don't run but crawl for a considerable part of their travel time. The research jointly carried out by Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Program at IIT and Desert Research Institute, Reno, has used GPS logs of buses as well as speed and fuel consumption readings of two-wheelers, three wheelers and cars to arrive at some shocking findings. Cars were found to be running at less than 4 kmph for 24% of the travel time. While travelling at this speed certainly defeats the purpose of using a motorized mode of transport, it also pollutes the city's air immensely.

If one considers more than a million cars running at similar speed, they may be wasting about 2.5 lakh litres of fuel every day while idling at traffic snarls. The emissions from such long idling time are obviously massive.

For buses, the research team used GPS logs for two days (November 1-2, 2012) from 941 state buses covering most of Delhi's road network. The GPS data for buses is archived by DIMTS. A similar centralized system is not available for other transport modes, so the team collected data using a "floating car method". A mix of 10 professional car drivers, 20 professional three-wheeler drivers and three researchers using two-wheelers drove around the city with a GPS device on the dashboard between 6am and midnight. The total distance covered during the exercise was 2160 km for cars, 1,210 km for three-wheelers and 650 km for two-wheelers. Of the total travel time of vehicles, idling time for cars was found to be 24%, three-wheelers 18%, buses 37% and for two-wheelers it was 20%. The team defines idling to be the time spent by the vehicle running at less than 4 kmph speed.

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