Super-Dense Crushload

An official term for the extreme overcrowding on Mumbai’s commuter trains.

“Passengers regularly forced to cling limpet-like to the sides of Mumbai’s rush hour trains because there is no room inside will tell you that as commutes go, theirs is a killer,” Rhys Blakely reported from India for The Times of London:

Officials have coined the term “super-dense crushload” to describe how 550 commuters are regularly crammed into a carriage built for 200 – a situation where up to 16 standing passengers share every square meter of floor space*.

According to Blakely, 4,357 people died on Mumbai’s railways in 2008: the bulk of those killed were hit by trains while trespassing on the tracks. But, he noted:

The next biggest portion of deaths – 853, or more than three every working day – were of passengers who fell (or were pushed) from carriages that travel at 40mph, have no doors and are often crammed dangerously full. Another 41 people perished after being bludgeoned by trackside poles while hanging out of overcrowded trains. Twenty-one were electrocuted to death by power cables as they sat on the roof — a location often chosen to avoid paying for tickets that cost only pennies.

Blakely quoted a local news photographer, Indranil Mukherjee, who remained sanguine about the cost-benefit calculation:

Yes, you will see the occasional dead body . . . but a three-month unlimited pass only costs about 1,500 rupees [$30].

(* This term is not new, but increasingly newsworthy and inflationary. In 1998, The Indian Express reported that a super-dense crushload denoted a load of 10–11 people per square meter.)