Last Saturday evening, I took the car out to drop a friend home at HSR layout. It's about four kilometres from our home in Koramangala. I had factored in twenty-five minutes, maybe thirty if the signal at the junction was bad. Nandini was with me.
We got back hour and fifteen minutes later.
In that hour+ I watched a delivery rider in a Zepto jacket overtake on the wrong side at a red light, a two-wheeler with no helmet ride straight into a no-entry one-way, an auto-rickshaw with passengers come down our lane against the flow of traffic, the driver leaning on the horn, expecting us to make way for him because he was in a rush. Two private cars doing exactly the same thing on a divided road, because the next U-turn was hundred metres away and waiting was apparently a thing they had outgrown.
It's also interesting and funny that these folks don't make eye contact and if they do, they convince you with the stare that you're on the wrong side of the road.
According to a report that came a while ago, Bangalore is the second most traffic-congested city in the world. The vehicle-to-population ratio here is the highest in India. Some numbers I got off the internet: 1.23 crore vehicles for a population of 1.5 crore where around 70% of those vehicles are two-wheelers.
The Bangalore Traffic Police, by their own published count, have about 3,150 officers managing 4.8 million vehicles and 9.6 million commuters. That works out to roughly one traffic cop per 3,900 vehicles, before you account for shifts, court appearances, leave, and the policemen who are physically off the road on any given day.
So the rage I felt that day isn't really about traffic really. Traffic alone doesn't enrage. On the road, the signal is red for me but not for the rider next to me. The road is one-way for me but two-way for the auto.
Are delivery riders the problem?
One could easily blame it on the delivery riders. But it's the organisations and their incentive systems. I found out some more data around this.
In one week of November 2024, the Bangalore Traffic Police booked 17,218 cases against delivery personnel and collected nearly Rs 80 lakh in spot fines. On the 9th of November alone, the police recorded 2,670 violations. 781 riders without helmets, 643 pillion riders without helmets, and 404 cases of riding into roads marked No Entry.
Again, this is just one week data of one city that the police themselves released.
It is tempting to read those numbers and conclude that delivery riders, as a category, have no civic sense.
Think about it for a minute. A man making Rs 8,000 a month, who has been told he will get Rs 30 more if he reaches your gate before the 7-minute mark, will go down the wrong side, right? He will also run the signal because the algorithm doesn't know about the signal. The algorithm only knows whether he was fast. The platform that he is "partnered" with has structured his earnings on speed and called the resulting bad behaviour his to own.
Now, who are these delivery partners? More than half of India's gig delivery drivers operate in big metros like Bangalore and Delhi, and the metro fleet is heavily made up of young men from smaller towns. But the men coming from Hosur and Tumkur and Bhopal aren't violating rules because their hometowns were lawless.
What about the auto-rickshaw drivers?
I have a strong suspicion that cops let autos off because they're a vote bank. But it's more nuanced really.
The Federation of Karnataka State Private Transport Associations represents 32 mobility-related organisations. When auto drivers showed up at the Transport Department's Shanthinagar office in 2024 demanding a ban on bike taxis, the Commissioner met them, listened to them, and within twenty-four hours the RTOs across Bangalore were instructed to launch a crackdown on electric bike taxis and other "illegal" bike taxis. See the power?
But remember the cops data? There are 3,150 officers to police 1.23 crore vehicles. They have to choose every minute who they pull over. It's quite logical from their point of view because they can stop the man in the Swift, who will pay the fine, argue, write a viral tweet, and move on. Or they can stop the auto driver, who will not pay quickly, will threaten to call his union, and will hold up the lane for the next half hour while his colleagues gather to discuss the matter. Poor Swift guy. Cops will almost always pick the cheaper transaction.
I found some more interesting things in this rabbit hole. In 2024, the official Toyota Fortuner used by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah was caught violating traffic rules on seven separate occasions, captured by the city's Intelligent Traffic Management System cameras. Six of the seven were for the Chief Minister not wearing a seat belt. Source. He is the highest road safety official in the state and he was caught seven times.
If the man with the most to lose by being filmed without a seat belt isn't wearing one, the system isn't being enforced from the top either. The auto driver is not a uniquely bad actor in a system of good ones. He is operating in the same equilibrium as everyone above him.
The wrong-side private car
The thing I haven't been able to stop thinking about, from that Saturday, is the private car going down the wrong side. He was probably someone who pays property tax, complains about garbage collection in his apartment WhatsApp group, and has strong views about Bangalore civic infrastructure. And for ninety seconds of saved time, he went down the wrong side of a divided road. Why the f*ck?
Bangalore's roads have been signalling, for at least a decade, that the rules are no longer being enforced. When I was working in Bangalore in 2014, I saw bike riders using the pedestrian footpath comfortably to skip the long traffic towards the edge of the signal junction. People have just become more aware of the fact that breaking traffic rules don't have any repercussions.
I'm doing my part
I don't know what would work to fix this horrible decline. There's no enforcement capacity, there's no world-class transport system or development speed of metros. Start-ups like Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy who actually employ the brightest of the minds of the country could take a crack at this but aren't, the auto unions have political weight that no current government in Karnataka has the appetite to confront - I mean, The CM's own car violated traffic rules seven times in one year!
I drive by the traffic rules. I don't jump the signal. I report every car, bike, auto-rickshaw on BTS ASTraM app (and hope it actually works). Nandini and I have stopped taking the car out on most evenings. I take it to office and back and only take it out for long drives.
The point of this blog post was just to learn more on why the city is the way it is now. Nothing else. Do your part and be a good citizen.