Bangalore Traffic and Ola/Uber pains - why are they getting worse?

Bangalore's trafffic is even worse than pre covid and ranting about cabs is the hottest topic in town? What are the obvious and not-so-obvious reasons behind this mess?

Cribbing out traffic was always a regular affair in the office aisles and pubs and meetups in Bangalore - covid-19 only gave a temporary break from the same. But now, Ola/Uber woes are giving this a hard competition where I see one post almost every day on LinkedIn (professional network huh? That’s a blog I’ll keep for another time)

I too face the brunt of the traffic since I drive myself and dont face the same cab woes as many people do.

And admitedly, in my 3+ decades of being in the city (okay, apart from my time at college and b-school), I too have never experienced it to be this bad.

I’ve seen this particular post shown below copy pasted at least by 20 different people which sums up the 3 key points of pain that folks face.

So, what are the reasons why the traffic is worse than ever before? Why is getting a cab or auto so difficult now? Some issues are common and some are unique.

Traffic - the obvious reasons for it

1. Bangalore wasn’t build for such an explosion in population where it gone from 5 million to 13+ million in just 20 years. In a separate blog, I’ll show how it was just a sleepy city with lots of PSUs, a little bit of manufacuring industries and a large army cantonment. The roads are just not wide enough and the layout is not planned.

2. The local transport is not as bad as you think. I have found BMTC buses to amongs the best in the country -far ahead of Mumbai/Delhi but maybe behind Chennai. Also, these buses also compete for the same roads and hence take the same time. Bangalore metro is at infancy in terms of coverage. But its the last mile coverage that is terrible. Have you seen how there are an army of autorickshaws (shared/individual) outside the metro/local stations in Mumbai and Delhi? Have you seen the number of short distance routes that they operate in for a reasonable fee? That doesn’t exist here be it due to the laziness of the autodrivers or lack of the culture every having existed.

3. Point 1 and 2 above have resulted in an explosion in vehicles in the city. Bangalore has the second most two wheelers for any city in India, a little behind Delhi -a city with twice the population

4. Abysmal short term planning with zero vision. The screenshot says it all-

   

Now the not so obvious reasons:

1. The city is dug up EVERYWHERE!

   • Metro construction going for for year

   • Flyovers and underpasses (Koramangala Sony Signal, behind Taj West End, Kundanahalli, HAL Signal etc) going on for a decade

   • “White topping” of concrete roads happening everywhere

   • The worst of all - cables and drainage work happening everywhere.

   The epitome of the above is at prime Koramangala 80 feet road where the road was dug up fully for at least a year, got some asphalting done finally and guess what - within 3 months they have blocked one way fully again to lay down some draining pipelines! :D

2. The map below shows the areas (marked in red lines) where there is metro construction going on- do notice that how most of it is in the eastern part of the city and near the IT/new age startups hubs? The irony is that more and more companies (Goldman Sachs, Myntra to name two nd I heard more are in the pipelines) are moving to ORR despite this due to supply demand issues elsewhere.

   

3. Have you noticed that in the older parts of the city -the traffic at least moves but in the newer parts - it can be at a standstill forever at bad times?

   This is because the older parts had at least some miniscule road planning done,

   but the newer parts see large buildings coming up first and roads narrow/village like roads coming up as an afterthought.

   Compare the roads in pic 1 (older part) where you see some reasonable layout and part 2 (newer part) where its chaos

   I blame this completely on the greed of the babus and the builders (who ironically call themselves developers).

   

   

4. The final and the most intriguing reason - IT bottlenecks capital:

   Have you ever noticed how non-uniform the roads are in terms of width? It can accommodate 4 cars are some places and the same road accomodates only 2 cars just 1 km ahead. All the digging and metro work and cars parked only make this worse and create small bottlenecks everywhere. The prime example of this is Hosur Road and Old Airport Road.

   Bottlenecks are also causes by bad pothols riddled roads - have you noticed how vehicles either slow down or avoid parts of the road that are full of craters?

   

   5. A largely lazy army of traffic cops who are more interested in collecting fines for obscure violations than controlling traffic. Their competence is on display in the pic below where they genuinely thought introducing 250 mannequins would scare traffic violaters. LOL LOL

   

What are the reasons why you’re facing issues with cabs?

1. Cabs are pissed with Ola/Uber and dont really trust them anymore. Many took large loans to finance the purchase of cabs during the boom time based on the income they used to get then. That is also why you get SO many requests to cancel the trip and be paid in cash/Google PAy to their personal number instead.

2. The unit economics are terrible with Diesel at nearly 100 and their income actually going down

   

3. There is a huge supply issue due to:

   

   • Drivers having left this field for other jobs during 2020/2021 and not returning

   • A lot of vehicles getting seized by financiers due to default

4. Sometimes you may see a few cabs/autos standing but not accepting your requests right? One cab driver I talked to said that he would rather work on late nights, Sundays and non peak hours than face the pain of traffic during peak hours - he may get 1.5x to 2x in fares but spends an equal amount of time in draining traffic.

   I completetely understand point 4 and given how much I drive around (bless audiobooks and podcasts), I can only imagine how mentally and physically draining it must be to drive in peak traffic day in and day out

I think there will be a few years of pain ahead before things get better - the metro will take a few more years and unless fuel prices come down considerably, I continue to see issues with cab bookings as well. This is all the more a reason that Hybrid working is here to stay.

In another blog, I will try writing how Bangalore has turned from a sleepy paradise city where I grew up (and where my father had migrated to far before that) to the burgeoning mess that it is today.