MUMBAI — The second phase of the Mumbai Coastal Road opened to traffic at 6 a.m. on Thursday, extending the signal-free corridor 9.5 kilometres north to Versova and redrawing the commute map of the western suburbs in a single morning.
By evening peak hour, the effect was measurable. The city’s traffic control room recorded a 38 percent drop in congestion on the Western Express Highway between Andheri and Borivali — the lightest Friday-evening load on that stretch since 2019. Travel time from Versova to the Worli sea face, routinely ninety minutes, averaged thirty-four.
By 7 p.m., the Western Express Highway recorded its lightest Friday evening traffic since 2019.
The extension includes two interchanges, a 2.1-kilometre twin tunnel under Juhu’s northern creek, and — in a first for an Indian urban expressway — a dedicated bus lane that the municipal transport undertaking says will carry forty new electric routes from October.
Not everyone is celebrating. Fishing cooperatives at Versova jetty, whose anchorage was relocated during construction, say compensation payments are eight months behind schedule. Environmental groups that lost a long legal battle over the project’s intertidal reclamation say they will now focus on enforcement of the mangrove-afforestation conditions attached to the clearance.
For the municipal corporation, the political arithmetic is simpler. Phase three — the northern extension to Bhayandar — is already tendered, and officials were quick on Thursday to promise it “ahead of schedule.” In this city, that is a claim commuters will believe when they drive it.
