Impact of Delhi Metro - An Amateur Study

One day while I was standing on a metro platform overlooking the road below, I conducted a following study. (Please note that my sample set for this study is 10 minutes of observation with only my eyes and a mobile with a stopwatch application)

Traffic at a red light intersection in a single direction:

Time taken for a single redlight  : 107 seconds (41 seconds red, 66 seconds green)
Number of 2 wheelers              : 153 (average over 3 samples)
Number of 3-4 wheelers            :  75 (average over 2 samples)
Number of Buses                   :   2  (average over 4 samples)

If we assume, that the number of people travelling on 2 wheelers are 1.3 persons per vehicle and number of people travelling in 4 wheelers around 2 people per vehicle. Lets assume that each bus carries around 75 passengers as well. ( Note that I do not have any data to support these assumptions. But this is based more on gut feeling and can be gross approximations) then number of people travelling per 150 seconds will be:
(153 * 1.3 + 75 * 2 + 2 * 75) * (150/107) =  498.8 people




Also, during this time, a metro comes every 2 minutes stopping for 30 seconds at the metro station. Each metro has around 4 compartments and each has sitting capacity of 50 and standing capacity of 292 passengers. Thus each metro has capacity of 1506 passengers and in peak hours it usually exceeds that. For conservative estimates, lets assume that metro carries 1000 people.



So, if there was no metro in Delhi, we would have needed to make the roads triple in width everywhere... 


UPDATE: Credit to Ankur to point me to right figures about metro coach capacities.