With an average of over 29 minutes to travel 10km, Bengaluru is the second slowest city in the world for driving after London, according to the recently-published TomTom Traffic Index. Bengalureans weigh in:
Avantika Mohapatra, capital management & investment advisor
I’m not surprised by the report. I lived in Hyderabad and Kolkata previously. While I’ve come to love Bengaluru, it has by far the worst traffic. The road to my office, which should ideally take less than 10 minutes, takes over 45 minutes during rush hour. On weekends, reaching home is a challenge. The abysmal traffic management and poor infrastructure are the reasons behind the slow traffic movement. The Metro is still not well connected, and bus facilities are not reliable. This is unacceptable for a city with a population like Bengaluru.
Aditya Mendonca, triathlete
The city has been growing at a crazy rate, and there’s been absolutely no planning. Building flyovers to solve traffic problems has been one of the worst ideas ever, because the roads that connect to these flyovers are terrible and there’s no actual benefit from it. It has only led to the city losing a lot of trees. Our roads are not inclusive. If you’re a cyclist the roads can be extremely dangerous. Meanwhile, the number of vehicles on the road continues to increase every year, yet there’s no space to park all these vehicles. We also need to improve public transport. Allowing people to carry bicycles on the Metro, like Kochi does, would be a great start.
Prasad bidappa, fashion Guru
Bengaluru has a peculiar traffic situation. Besides the normal rush hour density of traffic, we have many factors like VIP movement, road closures and pothole-ridden roads, which slow down traffic even more. We heard recently that the police commissioner has put together a crack team to ease this pressure, but soon after we heard that the crack team had been transferred! Between BBMP, BWSSB, BESCOM and other worthies, we the citizens have realised that there is no master plan, no vision statement or any long-term solutions to our problems. It’s each man for himself and may the devil take the hindmost.
Priyanka Golikeri, communications professional
I don’t think Bengaluru has the second slowest moving traffic in the world. The survey places Dublin, Ireland below Bengaluru and I don’t know how accurate that is. I’ve lived in cities like Bangkok
and Mumbai, and going by my experience, they have far slower moving traffic than Bengaluru. That is despite both those cities having really good public transport. Travelling 3-4 kilometres in Mumbai sometimes takes nearly an hour. I have never experienced that in Bengaluru. So it’s really puzzling to see Bengaluru being placed just below London in the survey.
Stanley Pinto, former advertising professional
When I first came to Bengaluru, nearly 30 years ago, there were 2,50,000 motorised vehicles, everything from cars, autos, motorcycles and commercial vehicles, registered in the city. Today, I believe there are over 7 million vehicles in the city. But in terms of infrastructure, nothing has changed. Apart from a few flyovers, the roads have largely remained the same. That explains why Bengaluru has the second slowest
moving traffic in the world. The Metro was such a good idea, but the execution has suffered a lot due to
corruption. I have lived in other cities across South-East Asia like Bangkok and Kaula Lumpur. When faced with similar traffic problems, they build underground Metros in record times. But the Bengaluru Metro has been in construction for nearly 15 years now.
Ritesh Roy, accounts coordinator
I started a new job recently and have been going to office every day. Having been working from home for the past few years, I was taken aback to find out that it would take me more than two hours to traverse just 16 km. At some stretches, like Marathahalli, traffic slows to a crawl, taking me around 25 minutes just to cover 4 km despite having two underpasses and reasonably better roads. When I lived in Delhi, I used to travel around 90 km daily in just four hours. I guess, the flyovers, multiple means to commute, Metro connectivity and better condition roads in Delhi NCR region makes the difference.