Cost of traffic congestion, anybody?

Read this article by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar. Very topical, very relevant. Have a look.
And while there are many pertinent questions and points raised there, I will especially like to bring your attention to these two.

The Centre for Science and Environment has launched a campaign to make drivers of cars and two-wheelers pay the full social cost that they impose on the economy, which I fully support. These costs are typically invisible to the public, but are real and gargantuan.
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Fourth, we suffer high costs of congestion. Time wasted is money wasted. Slow traffic consumes more fuel and pollutes more. In the US, says Sunita Narain of CSE, the cost of traffic congestion in 85 cities was estimated at a staggering $63 billion in 2003, on account of time wasted alone.

Fifth, cars impose high social costs by occupying parking space. Residential space in Delhi sells for Rs 1.5 lakh per square yard in most localities. So a parking lot 100 yards long and 20 yards wide has a social cost of Rs 30 crore. A single parking space of 23 sq m has a social cost of Rs 37.8 lakh. A car occupies more space than an office desk, yet the desk space pays full commercial rent while parking space costs just Rs 10 per day. This is a huge, unwarranted subsidy, especially to those who keep their cars parked all day. In New York or Washington DC, parking costs $9 (Rs 400) per hour. CSE's efforts to raise the parking rate to Rs 120/day in Delhi were kayoed by the middle class and politicians. The parking space occupied by cars is estimated by CSE at 11% of Delhi's area, as much as all its parks put together. That is a measure of the social cost.

I think point 5 is especially relevant, and is something that we commonly fail to notice. And point 4? We do notice that, don’t we?
So how much do we in Bangalore, at an average, lose due to traffic congestion? That’s a research paper in itself, but I will just provide some basic numbers. At an average, let us assume 5 minutes (why, I will reduce it even further, say 2.5 minutes) lost everyday due to traffic congestions for every employee in Bangalore, (realistic I guess, and this is not including opportunity cost lost, and this is assuming, and knowing that many companies anyway have a float of 30 minutes or so for the employees before start of the business day).
So where does that leave us? As per this Hindu article, we lost Rs 500 Crore due to the Bangalore strike in Feb. Calculating from there on using our previous assumption, we have about 104 Million dollars in business losses every year due to traffic congestion! Nearly the same, higher infact than the loss incurred due to that day in Feb. And I thought I was working with very conservative numbers. Bad, na?
As you could well have figured out by now, this started off as a rant after an impossible amount of traffic faced while traveling down to office yesterday morning.