Bengaluru, a city gridlocked and stranded Premium

Years of poor mobility planning have made Bengaluru a traffic nightmare

Bengaluru’s traffic problem has long been a subject of public frustration, with commuters losing an extraordinary number of hours on choked roads. Therefore, the latest TomTom report that ranked Bengaluru as the second-most congested city in the world has come as no surprise. For a city that positions itself as India’s technology and innovation capital, this is an indictment of years of poor mobility planning.

Congestion in Bengaluru is not merely the result of rising population or economic growth. It is the outcome of planning choices that failed to align transport infrastructure with how the city actually functions. Data from Karnataka Transport Department show that the number of registered vehicles in Bengaluru has risen sharply from about one crore in 2020-21 to nearly 1.23 crore in April 2025. This growth has occurred alongside the concentration of employment in a few major clusters, mainly Electronics City, the Whitefield–ITPL corridor, and the 17-km Outer Ring Road (ORR) stretch, that houses lakhs of daily office commuters. These corridors were not initially prioritised in the city’s public transport expansion.

Bengaluru’s commute backbone remains the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), operating 7,067 buses, catering to nearly 48 lakh passengers every day, the highest ridership for any city-run public transport system in India. Despite its scale, the BMTC has struggled with a shrinking fleet strength relative to demand, slow average speeds due to mixed traffic, and the absence of dedicated bus priority lanes. The pressure on the BMTC recently prompted former Infosys CFO T.V. Mohandas Pai to suggest that the BMTC should be opened up to private participation, which drew strong opposition from Transport Minister Ramalinga Reddy, who argued that public transport cannot be run for profit. While the Minister’s defence of a public-run bus system is valid, without sustained capital investment, bus priority infrastructure and increase in number of buses, the BMTC cannot solve the traffic issue.

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