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Every morning at 8:30am sharp, Geeta H steps out of her rented home in Kithaganur, a locality tucked away in East Bengaluru’s KR Puram suburb. Her husband starts the bike, ready to navigate the first leg of her long daily journey — 10 minutes to TC Palya bus stand on the arterial Old Madras Road.
Her destination: Shivaji Nagar, where she works as an accounts superintendent. The distance from her home to office is about 16 kilometres but the time it takes to reach there: nearly 1.5 hours, one way.
Sixteen kilometres. Ninety minutes. Three buses. One metro. This is not just her commute but a daily battle with Bengaluru’s broken mobility system.
Geeta’s story symbolises Bengaluru’s notorious transportation crisis — where distance is not the defining metric, but connectivity and congestion are. Her current office has no direct public transport facility and that is why her routine consists of a patchwork of modes: From bike to bus to metro to yet more buses.
Sample this: After her husband drops her at TC Palya bus stand, she takes a bus to the Benniganahalli metro station, and boards a metro that takes her to central Bangalore to Vidhana Soudha metro station. From there, she takes another bus to the Cantonment bus stand and then her last bus to CSI bus stop in Shivaji Nagar. From here, she walks for 5-6 minutes and reaches her office.
“One or two changes are okay,” she shrugs. “But this is too much. There are days when I don’t get a seat at all in the first bus,” she says, referring to the overcrowded TC Palya–Benniganahalli route.
For the metro ride from Benniganahalli to Vidhana Soudha, she pays Rs 40 one way — double what it used to be until recently. The Bengaluru Metro Rail Corporation Ltd (BMRCL), responsible for running the metro in the city, hiked fare on ‘Namma Metro’ routes sharply by 40-50 per cent in February this year, making it the costliest metro service in the country.
Residents and experts have questioned the prudence of increasing the fares in a city like Bengaluru which needs to discourage people from private vehicles.
But thanks to the Karnataka government’s Shakti scheme, which offers free bus rides to women across Karnataka on non-luxury state-run buses, Geeta’s bus travel is free. But “free” does not mean convenient or accessible. She pays with her time, energy and daily stress.
The evening journey is even more exhausting. If she’s lucky and leaves her office by 5:30 pm sharp, she reaches home by 7pm. If not, she finds herself waiting in long queues, letting packed buses pass by at Benniganahalli; in the evening, she has the “luxury” to wait for more buses.
After reaching home, her day doesn’t end. She cooks dinner for her husband and two children. Sometimes, she prepares all the day’s meals before leaving in the morning, anticipating the fatigue from travelling.
“I have to travel in peak hours and it gets exhausting. Everyone’s rushing. The Old Madras Road is completely jammed. There is slow moving traffic. There are four lanes, and that is still not enough,” she shared.
Old Madras Road (NH4) links Bengaluru to Chennai and other cities and also to major IT hub area Whitefield. Once a relatively calm thoroughfare, it’s now a corridor of chaos, where traffic snarls and stalled buses are as common as the new high-rises lining the skyline.
Born and brought up in Bengaluru, Geeta has seen the change first hand. “Earlier, this road had space. Now there are apartments everywhere. And everyone has cars. It’s urbanisation at full speed,” she said.
From next month, Geeta plans to switch to her two-wheeler—her “escape” from this unrelenting daily grind. “On the scooty, it will take me one hour. But at least no changing buses,” she said.
Her plan is not unique. Many urban commuters are abandoning public transport not only because it’s costly, but also because it’s inconvenient. For a city that is often referred to as a global IT capital and the ‘Silicon Valley of India’, this trend is troubling. Bengaluru today has 2.55 million cars, according to Karnataka's Transport department data, as of April 30, 2025. The car ownership has increased from two million cars in 2020-21.
In 2024, the city topped India’s list for traffic gridlocks, with an average speed of just 18 kilometres per hour during rush hour. This was calculated by a Dutch navigation technology firm TomTom. However, despite this, city residents were rushing out to buy more private vehicles.
Apart from cars, the number of two-wheelers in the city also increased from 6.7 million in 2020-21 to 8.3 million as of April 30, 2025. In total, the number of vehicles on the city’s roads increased from 10 million in 2020-21 to 12.4 million in April 2025. These numbers may be underestimated as many migrant residents opt for registering their vehicle in their own cities as Karnataka has one of the highest road taxes in the country.
The increase in car and two-wheeler ownership is because of the huge gap between demand for travel and supply of infrastructure to satisfy that demand, said Ashish Verma, professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru, and convenor of IISC’s Sustainable Transportation Lab that works on transportation research and policy.
Contrastingly, the number of buses in the city remain more or less stagnant at 0.1 million between this period. The Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), which provides bus services in the city, has failed to expand its fleet size and increase the ridership in over a decade. While the number of buses in 2011-12 was 6,064, now it is 6,835, as per BMTC data.
More private vehicles also mean more fuel consumption. Bengaluru stands second in fuel consumption in the country only behind Delhi, according to data given in government’s own ‘Comprehensive Mobility Plan 2020’. The petrol consumption in Bengaluru is about 70,000 kilolitres a month on an average, according to Indian Oil.
As per a 2019 research paper Air quality, emissions and source contributions analysis for Greater Bengaluru region of India, vehicle exhaust and on-road dust resuspension account for 56 per cent and 70 per cent of total PM2.5 and PM10 emissions respectively.
While Bengaluru boasts of one of the fastest-expanding metro systems in India, entire pockets of residential zones are still off the grid. While ownership of private vehicles is fast expanding, the operational metro network has just reached 77 km since the development of its first phase started around 14 years ago in 2011. “In the same period, the population has more than doubled. So, there is a massive short supply of public transport,” said Verma.
The delays in metro construction, while crushing whatever optimism commuters once had, has in fact aggravated traffic snarls. And residents say that even the proposed metro routes are ill-conceived and will not be of much help to them.
Criticising the low ridership of Bengaluru metro, a parliamentary standing committee report presented in Lok Sabha in 2022 had said that the actual average daily ridership was only 96,000 then, as compared to average ridership of 1.85 million required for breakeven.
For Sai Krishna Tatta and Prem Kumar, both government employees and living in different parts of the city, the daily trip to work is less of a routine and more of a well-planned battle. While Bengaluru dreams of becoming a smart city, the basics of mobility infrastructure are warped.
One of the main challenges for both is that the metro route from their areas will first take them farther away from their destination before looping back, requiring multiple line changes. For both, there is no shortest option to the office when it comes to public transport.
Tatta, a resident of HSR Layout in city’s southeast, covers a distance of 14 km through his car due to a distinct lack of better options. “There’s no direct metro from HSR Layout to Vidhana Soudha,” he explained. “Even when the proposed metro line is completed, I’ll have to change trains twice or thrice. I’ll have to take a metro line going away from my office, then switch to other trains. That just doesn’t make sense.”
He drives his own car instead, and carpools with two or three others and spends around one hour on average and sometimes an hour and a half each way.
At certain junctions, like a particular stretch on Hosur Road, which is the key road to scores of IT companies, he spends 10 minutes crawling through just 100 metres of traffic. “It’s chaos. A three-lane road becomes two because of bottlenecks and rule-breaking,” he said. The city was ranked third slowest in travel time, after Barranquilla in Colombia and Kolkata, in the global traffic index for 2024 by TomTom.
He agreed that his commute by his own car is not ideal but at least he has control. City buses are packed and they don’t follow timings, he shared. “By bus, it will take me 1.5 hours and I will rarely get a seat. The roads are a nightmare and the bus drivers go fast through potholes. It’s a pain to stand for that long a time for three hours daily. And then you have to bargain with auto drivers morning and evening. All this just eats into your mind space,” he said with visible frustration.
Prem Kumar Sriramoju, who lives in the northern part of the city in Yelahanka and rides a bike to his office, shares Tatta’s frustrations. He leaves by 9am and reaches around 10:15 am. For him, public transport is a distant dream. “The proposed metro on my stretch is 5-6 km away from my home. And the metro map of even that line is such that it goes in the opposite direction first,” he said.
While Bengaluru has made strides like free bus travel for women and ‘smart’ plans, the fundamental promise of mobility is increasingly breaking down. Geeta sums up what the crisis in the city feels like for its residents, “I feel like I spend my whole life just commuting.”
This is the first of two stories on transport planning in Bengaluru. Read the second part. This article is part of our series on how India moves, which looks at the relationship between air quality and human mobility in cities and towns. This story is the first in the Bengaluru series.
