“Even if the Gods descend, they can’t fix the city. The situation is that bad,” Karnataka’s deputy chief minister and Bengaluru Development and Town Planning Minister, DK Shivakumar, described the state of Bengaluru back in February.
For 52-year-old resident Gautam L, those words ring painfully true. Gautam’s workplace is just six kilometres away from his home in Rajajinagar in Malleshwaram. Yet, what should be a quick commute has turned into a daily endurance test.
Out of sheer frustration, Gautam has abandoned all vehicles, private and public, for his commute to work. Instead, each morning at 8 am, he sets out from his home on foot and walks the entire stretch to reach his office by 9 am.
It's not a choice made out of preference, but necessity. Having lived in Bengaluru for over four decades, Gautam has seen the city grow into a bustling IT hub, but also watched its infrastructure crumble under the pressure. Traffic congestion, unreliable public transportation, and poor road conditions have made driving or taking a bus nearly impossible.
“In this city, walking is the only reliable way to get anywhere,” he said. “It’s not efficient. It’s just less frustrating.”
The metro functions on his route but it is not a realistic option. Even for a short 6 km commute, the metro doesn’t offer a direct route. “For just 6 km, I have to change two metro lines. And during rush hour, I can’t even get in. If at all I get in, I won’t be able to get out at my station,” he said, talking about the rush of commuters.
If he takes his two-wheeler, it takes him more than an hour to reach office. “Every 50 metres, there’s a signal, a bottleneck, or some kind of jam. Same for buses; Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation buses are often overcrowded, especially during peak hours,” he said.
Despite his commitment to walking, it is a distressing experience.
“There’s garbage and dust all around, potholes, broken footpaths and two-wheelers encroaching on sidewalks. Bengaluru was called a pensioner’s paradise, now it has become smeller’s (sic) paradise,” he remarked sarcastically. “It’s supposed to be a smart city!”
Another resident, Sandeep, who has been living in the city for last 10 years, said that in the 13 km distance from his home to office, he has to stop at different junctions at least 10 times, and at some of those, he halts for more than two minutes.
In 2024, Bengaluru ranked 68 in a congestion level index by TomTom, a Dutch navigation technology firm. The rank was a 4 per cent jump compared to 2023. According to its analysis, the average duration to traverse 10 km in Bengaluru was 30 minutes and 10 seconds, which was 50 seconds more than the time taken in 2023.
The city is becoming immobile under the weight of its own growth — the roads are getting smaller, the vehicles bigger. Residents like Gautam, who have been living in the city for decades now, said that Bengaluru’s roads were never meant for this volume of traffic and that the infrastructure is now giving way.
Bengaluru’s 2025 population was estimated to be around 14 million, an enormous boom from its humble population of 746,000 in 1950, as per United Nation’s World Population Review. This means in the last 75 years, the city's population has ballooned almost 18 times. The population growth has been especially rapid in the last few years, with four million people added in the last decade alone.
This surge in population has been accompanied by a sharp rise in the number of vehicles; over the same period, more than five million vehicles were added to the city’s roads. In total, the city has over 12 million vehicles.
And it still has not reached its saturation levels. Today, the city has around 165 cars per 1,000 people, far from the saturation levels seen in countries like the United States and Germany, which have 600-800 cars, Ashish Verma, professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru, told Down To Earth.
“Delhi has somewhere around 200 cars per 1,000 people and the country’s average is hardly 30 cars per 1,000 population. But even the current ratio in Bengaluru has created such huge traffic jams,” said Verma, who is also the convenor of IISc’s Sustainable Transportation Lab that works on transportation research and policy.
Bengaluru did not have a smooth transition from a small to a big city. “It just exploded abruptly without having the infrastructure of a big city,” added Verma. “This happened because of a lot of white-collar jobs and the scale of economy and the employment the city is offering, which ultimately leads to more car ownership.”
Bengaluru has only 1 km of road per 1,000 people, compared to the national average of 5 km, as per the Asian Development Bank’s Asian Transport Outlook released in December 2024. In terms of vehicle density, the city has around 850 vehicles per km.
In fact, a few months ago, Karnataka Home Minister G Parameshwara, in a media interview, acknowledged that the city’s roads and transport systems were not designed to accommodate its current population and vehicle density.
To solve the crisis, the government is undertaking and considering multiple high-profile projects: from a North-South tunnel corridor connecting Hebbal and Silk Board junction (two junctions that see severe traffic congestion), and elevated corridors to the ambitious 40.5 km double decker flyover beneath the metro line.
But residents as well as transport and mobility experts believe that most of these projects essentially add more lanes or roads. This makes private vehicle ownership and use more attractive, while congestion worsens.
The proposed tunnel roads and double-decker flyover (with a metro line running above) are expected to cost a staggering Rs 40,000 crore and Rs 8,916 crore, respectively. However, a study by IISc’s Sustainable Transportation Lab indicated that these projects will discourage public transport use and could worsen traffic congestion. This is because the capacity of such tunnels and flyovers to move people is significantly lower compared to metro or light rail systems.
For example, the ‘Passengers Per Hour Per Direction’ (PPHPD) capacity of the tunnel road is just 1,800, while metros can handle 69,000 and suburban rail systems up to 89,000.
From a financial standpoint as well, tunnel roads are far less efficient. Metro construction averages Rs 500 crore per kilometre and suburban rail Rs 110 crore per kilometre, whereas tunnel roads are estimated at Rs 1,000 crore per kilometre, totalling Rs 40,000 crore for 40 km with minimal returns.
“A metro line added almost 40 times more capacity for a same road of one lane of 2.5 metre width. In that same width, you can lay a metro track, which means that in the same space, a metro offers 40 times more capacity in people per hour per direction, as compared to a normal traffic lane. This is how you have to understand the space and imagine what each mode or each type of transport system can do,” said Verma, who led the IISc study.
The report highlighted that the introduction of these projects, while increasing the allure of private transport, will reduce metro ridership along most corridors by 4-10 per cent by 2041.
Calling these projects “unsustainable” and a “recipe for disaster”, Verma noted that double-decker and tunnel roads, apart from prioritising personal vehicles over public transit and non-motorised modes, also widen socioeconomic disparities, exacerbate environmental degradation and reduce the overall effectiveness of the urban transportation network.
On the other hand, the Bengaluru suburban railway project, worth Rs 15,767 crore and featuring 148 km of rail network and 58 stations, has been on the backburner and facing continued delays for decades now.
But even in the current plan with four corridors, the designing is such that there is not much integration between the metro and rail network.
The ideal way to implement this is to ensure that the metro and railway lines feed into one another and the two services complement each other rather than compete. Right now, both are going parallel to each other.Ashish Verma, professor, Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru
There should be a seamless integration like creating interchanges and coordinating metro and rail networks, the expert added.
Shaheen Shasa, a member of Bengaluru Bus Prayanikara Vedike, a bus commuters’ rights forum, called the projects a result of “outdated thinking” that pushes more and more cars on roads.
“Whereas, investing in improving bus infrastructure will cost so much less money. But we have the same around 6,000 fleet of buses since the last 15-20 years. The city is underserved. There can be a lot done in terms of mapping the demand for buses,” she said.
The number of buses per 100,000 population is a dismal 50. The figure is from Bengaluru’s Comprehensive Mobility Plan, prepared by the state government in 2020. It highlighted how buses have not kept pace with the growing population and how bus utilisation has been reducing due to the ever-rising private vehicular population in the city.
Shasa, who takes the bus frequently, said that buses and bus users are not the primary determinants during any kind of urban planning exercise.
Giving an example of how bus stops are many times inaccessible due to their placements, she said, “Big junctions and flyovers are an added impediment for bus users as navigating them to reach a bus stop becomes a nightmare. In a way this makes it harder for the bus users to commute by bus. The main consideration during planning is how private vehicles will move faster without stopping.”
She also said that metro planning in the city has become more of a “real estate” project rather than a mobility project.
“The amount of investment being pumped into metro projects and the value received needs to be studied. There has been a lot of traffic disruption because of metro construction. We need to ask questions like which are the areas the metro is going to serve or how is it going to address the last-mile connectivity issues,” she said.
Residents also highlighted how last-mile connectivity is a huge deterrent in choosing metro as the primary mode of transport. Haritha R, a resident of north Bengaluru, said that many office goers like her do not opt for a metro ride in the morning as the connectivity till the metro station from their houses is poor.
“It will take me over 30 minutes to reach the metro station itself. So, I prefer taking a direct cab to office. Most stations are coming up near big landmarks and far from residential localities,” she said.
As residents grow increasingly disillusioned, Bengaluru continues to expand without a cohesive mobility plan or integration of its transit systems.
This is the second of two stories on transport planning in Bengaluru. Read the first part. The articles are part of our series on how India moves, which looks at the relationship between air quality and human mobility in cities and towns.