As a Bangalorean, it bothers Nikhil Kamath that whenever he brings up the city in conversation with connections in other cities, the city's traffic woes hijack the conversation. So, in the latest episode of his podcast WTF is, the billionaire entrepreneur and host brought together two of Bengaluru’s top police officers and asked them if there's any solution to the infamous problem.
Sitting across a table with police commissioner B Dayananda, and traffic police commissioner MN Anucheth, Kamath asked, "I'm from Bangalore, as Bangalorean as anybody can be. Wherever I go and tell good things about Bangalore, people tell me, 'traffic, traffic, traffic. What is the problem? What is the solution? Is there a solution?"
Anucheth replied that, unlike other metropolitan cities, Bengaluru witnessed an "explosive growth" between 2013 and 2023, and the city's infrastructure could not cope with it. Moreover, he also highlighted that historically, the city lacked public transport facilities such as metros, trams, and local trains which only aggravated traffic problems as the population grew.
"I think the amount of criticism we get is totally disproportionate to the problem at hand. I think every major metropolitan city across the world faces the issue of traffic," Anucheth said. "Because, let's face it, cities are magnets or attractive places for employment. It attracts a lot of people. And year on year, a city grows. The thing with Bangalore has been that post-2000, after the IT boom, there has been a significant explosive growth. And the infrastructure has not commensurately grown with the growth of vehicles or the human population. Now, Bangalore has the highest number of vehicles per 1,000. It's 872 per 1,000 population."
The joint commissioner of police, traffic, pointed out that the city has more number of vehicles per 1,000 people than even Mumbai and Delhi. "Simply incomparable," he said. "Hyderabad is comparable. It's at about 750. But Bangalore is very high. So, we have 1.5 crore population with 1.23 crore vehicle population. So, with the kind of explosive growth... So the compounded annual growth rate of vehicles is 8 percent, right? We doubled between 2013 and 2023. It was 56 lakh, it became 1.12 crore. So, if you see that kind of growth rate, infrastructure will never be enough."
'Public transport is the long-term solution to Bengaluru's traffic problems'
Anucheth also pointed out that when it comes to the history of public transportation systems across different metropolitan cities, Kolkata had trams, Delhi had the metro railway, and Mumbai had local trains, while all Bengaluru had was the BMTC buses.
"The long-term solution to Bangalore's problems is public transport, whether it's K-RIDE suburban trains, or it is metro, increasing the fleet... I think that's the way to go forward. And that's where it is. It is just that the implementation has taken some time," he said. Citing an example, Anucheth said that when the Baiyappanahalli line got connected to the Whitefield line, it reduced peak hour traffic reduced by 17 percent.
"Like, for example, the Outer Ring Road line opens for metro, not only will the metro be available, even the carriage space where the metro work is going on, which has reduced because of the metro work, would not be there. I mean, you would get the full entire 10-lane available to you. I think it would improve," the traffic commissioner said.
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