Chennai: If you live in Chennai’s suburbs or on the outskirts and believe driving to work is the quickest option, the numbers challenge that assumption.
All estimates covered peak-hour and door-to-door travel, while costs assumed 264 working days annually. On these corridors, suburban rail or a rail-bus combination saved commuters between 10 and 50 minutes daily. A Tambaram–Guindy commuter completed the journey by EMU in 50 minutes, against 90 minutes by car. Kilambakkam–Central took 120 minutes by rail and nearly three hours by car. Annual EMU or combined rail-bus expenditure ranged from ₹5,280 to ₹21,120, against ₹1.25 lakh to ₹2.26 lakh for a small car. Several routes made rail travel more than 90% cheaper than driving from the suburbs. Two-wheeler expenses ranged from ₹47,500 to ₹1.09 lakh.
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“This proves that Chennai has a better public-transport system, but they still work as separate systems instead of one connected network,” said K P Subramanian. “Over the years, the number of people using public transport has fallen from 43% in 1995 to 23% in 2025,” the retired Anna University professor said. A TOI analysis of journey times and costs across five prominent routes found that cars were never the fastest mode of transport. It covered Tambaram–Guindy, Central–Tambaram, Tambaram–Koyambedu, Velachery–Tambaram and Kilambakkam–Central. The analysis compared local trains, MTC buses, two-wheelers and cars on daily round trips ranging from 34km to 80km. The cost gap was sharper. Even two-wheelers cost substantially more than public transport, despite offering greater flexibility. Download the TOI App.