When civic apathy brings Bengaluru to a halt

The lack of coordination among civic agencies in Bengaluru leads to traffic congestion, insufficient parking, and other infrastructural problems.

In the week leading up to Christmas, a newly inaugurated mall on the service road of Ballari Road in north Bengaluru — Phoenix Mall of Asia — was constantly in the news for the massive traffic jams outside the humongous structure. But on Christmas Eve, the situation turned into a nightmare. While the mall has a parking capacity for 2,324 cars and two-wheelers, vehicles of the people who had come to the mall — an estimated four times the capacity — piled up on the road outside with nowhere to go.

Soon after, Police Commissioner B. Dayananda requested the city’s civic body, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), to withdraw the partial occupancy certificate (OC) provided to the mall, citing a plethora of reasons, including insufficient parking facility. The BBMP said that since the building bylaws and zonal regulations were followed by the mall, the withdrawal of the OC was unlikely.

While the all-too-common traffic jams in the burgeoning IT capital have moved on from being “news” to becoming a matter of jokes and memes on social media, what the Christmas Eve chaos highlighted was the complete absence of coordination among civic agencies. “Construction of the structure was going on for years. Why didn’t the agencies concerned say anything about the insufficient parking facility until the mall was up and running?” asked Madappa K., a cab driver who has made several trips to the mall.

Problems such as traffic congestion, lack of parking space, and entry and exit point blockades have been flagged by residents living near commercial establishments, large apartment complexes, schools, and workspaces.

For instance, the almost 2-km-long stretch between Borewell Road and the B.R. Ambedkar statue at Whitefield in east Bengaluru had 14 schools back in 2018. Today, many more apartment complexes and schools have come up on the stretch, leaving the main road unequipped to handle the traffic density.

“While giving building permissions at such places, why does the BBMP not think about parking facilities and entry and exit strategies from the buildings before vehicles coming there add to the traffic?” questioned Zibi Jamal of Whitefield Rising, a citizens’ collective.

She pointed out that several stores on the main roads at Whitefield have no parking facility despite the people coming there invariably bringing their vehicles. “There is also a famous restaurant at Kundalahalli and many fast-food joints around Whitefield which have absolutely no space for car parking. Some of them take up a lane or two on roads for parking, leading to traffic snarls,” she added. Similar complaints have been aired against restaurants in other areas of the city, but they continue to flourish, with no parking facility, adding to the traffic chaos in these localities.