Bangalore likes to challenge its commuters with all sorts of hurdles. You have to navigate around potholes while swerving to avoid pedestrian traffic or make-shift dividers or blissfully unaware cows. To notch it up another level, it introduces dark spots.

Dark spots along the Outer Ring Road (ORR) due to inadequate lighting remains an issue ignored amidst ostentatious plans of concrete roads, flyovers, body cameras and what not. Little info for folks who don’t live here, ORR is a 60KM long ring road that defined Bangalore’s periphery two decades ago but is now within city limits and is lined with large tech parks, apartments, malls, buildings and has little greenery around. The city’s infamous traffic memes can be attributed to ORR.

Last week, I mapped close to 650 streetlights around my house and office that’s located on the ORR. ORR always felt poorly lit and I wanted to put a number to it.

Functional street lights along the ORR. View the map here

It indeed is poorly lit, no surprise there. 38%. That’s the percentage of streetlights that function along this stretch. If you divide the area into HSR and Bellandur, you can see for yourself how abysmal the numbers are. You can interact with the map here.

Percentage of functional streetlights. Orange for Functional and Grey for Defunct streetlights.

This isn’t a recent scenario, it has been happening for months. The obvious next step was to place a complaint. It’s unbelievable how utterly ineffective BBMP portal is. There is no way to geotag locations on the portal, instead they expect photos and a door number! Potholes or streetlights will not have an address! Of course, I’m yet to hear about my successfully registered complaints.

The trouble with road safety measures in India is that it starts and stops at individual’s awareness- follow traffic rules, look while your cross, assist during road emergencies. Minimal changes or basic maintenance such as lighting up a street will reduce your accidents and crime.

The act doesn’t stop here with one snapshot of an area. The plan is to cover more areas, get more people involved, draw wider attention and maybe one day, the city will truly be lit. If you wish to contribute, read on.