[jariel]

"but I don't think any society will behave differently if you put that many people in that small of a space."

Just the opposite; some cultures have rigid social organisation and deal with such problems, some cultures have little to no social organisation. In the former traffic flows, in the later it does not.

[raz32dust]

That is an interesting point. Though Mumbai has a much higher population density that HK/Tokyo, those number can be misleading. May be India's diversity also plays a role here. Because I checked the list of cities by pop density, and the once that I think have good traffic flow are the ones that are more uniform. Diverse societies have a harder time making people follow rules. Not sure about traffic, but it sure makes sense in general.

[jariel]

Population density, and growth, are also functions of social organisation :)

Obviously some things are much more difficult to manage than others (i.e. controlling reproduction is probably harder to tweak than traffic flows), but nevertheless - the prevailing conditions are usually an outcome of some collective choice or lack thereof.

Consider the paradox of the 'dirty city': most cities with garbage laying about, also have very high unemployment. We might think 'oh, they have no money to clean it up', but this is upside down, a city with high unemployment has more slack in the labour force than elsewhere. In clean (usually rich) cities, it's often hard to determine where value can be created but in a dirty city, it's obvious - everyone wins if they just clean up, it's an obvious investment, and the labour should be cheap. (Money is a social contract, its fungible, intelligent administrators should be able to find some kind of distribution that works.) So why are they dirty? With so many people not doing a whole lot?

Even by this 'they have no money' logic, poor cities with slack/cheap labour should be much cleaner than rich cities, wherein it soaring wages etc. should make it more difficult to clean up. Rich cities might be dirty as the cost of cleaning with high wages etc. should be way, way more.

But it's the other wary around: high degrees of social organisation create wealth. Many 'resources' (waterworks, social services, cars) are functions of that social order, except natural resources of course, which are obviously important.

Obviously, it's nary impossible to fix 'one social problem' (i.e. garbage or traffic) without really well established social conditioning on a basic level, and of course, some very powerful external forces can prohibit such development (i.e. constantly flooding plains ruin agricultural industry every decade, never allowing it to develop as an economic base, there was a war, famine etc.), but even then - it does not take 'resources' to have safe/clean/moral/lawful organisation (though it can certainly help), nor does it require wealth - in fact, wealth is created by such organisation.

I don't blame the Mumbai police or any single citizen, but collectively they make their own bed on traffic - and most other things.

Yes, it's going to be 'tight' and yes, they are a little 'natural resource poor' but they can get along and make it work if they really want to. And when they get better at that, there's a 100% chance they'll be getting better at everything else as well, and subsequently, a lot richer.

The same applies to the rest of us.