For years, Priyanka Dias, 25, a business analyst with a global IT firm in the special economic zone of Santacruz Electronics Export Processing Zone (SEEPZ), in the western suburb of Andheri, spent 1.45 hours travelling from office to home for roughly a distance of 18 km during peak hour traffic. That's 10.28 km per hour.

Most of this time, roughly 45 minutes, was spent commuting a meagre 5.2 km stretch from SEEPZ to Andheri railway station. This means she travelled 1.9 metres per second, which is comparable to the pace of beetles and faster than that of spiders, tortoises and snails.

On good days, Dias took a bus; on others she took her chances with an autorickshaw. Mostly, she walked from office along the dusty, noisy, traffic-infested stretch to her destination.

As it turns out, walking was the fastest way of getting there.

This was before the 11.4 km-long, Rs 4,300-crore Metro Line 1, Mumbai's first modern mass rapid-transit system line, linking Ghatkopar in the east to Versova in the west, opened in June 2014.