Frustrated with Bangalore traffic? Our research reveals some interesting findings…

Bangalore… one of the fastest growing cities, also known as India’s Silicon Valley, and a house of more than two million IT workers.

Bengaluru, as it has been officially called since November 2014, is the hub of the $150 billion information technology sector that contributes nearly 10% to India’s GDP.

In fact, Bangalore has become such a powerful city that foreigners dread the term Bangalored- which means losing your job in west. People from all over India flock here to get a job, earn a good living and enjoy a decent lifestyle. The expansion has been so great that it has grown twice its size in past 40 years.

However, this rapid expansion has come at a hefty price. There has been a 6000% increase in the number of vehicles on streets since 1990. And this humongous rise in vehicles have given rise to monstrous traffic. This problem has now become so great that people have started getting anxiety attacks from just the thought of driving to work.

In last 15 years, the rate of movement of traffic has come down from 40 km/hour to 9 km/hour.

But.. wait a second, do you think population is the reason for this distressing condition of traffic? Or is it something else? Our research reveals some interesting findings.

Is population the reason?

We started with asking ourselves a question, if population is the reason for traffic, then cities with highest population densities should suffer from similar problem.

The below picture shows live traffic in four most populated cities in the world on a Saturday evening.

Live traffic in four cities with highest population densities

Following are the stats for people living per sq. km for the four cities:

1. New York : 10,200 people/km²

2. Washington : 9,800 people/km²

3. Chandigarh : 9,500 people/km² (approx.)

4. Namma Bangalore : 6,000 people/km² (approx.)

However, when we observed the traffic condition in the other three, they showed almost no signs of traffic congestion. And on the contrary, Bangalore, which has lesser population density than the other three, was traffic blocked.

Is city plan the reason?

Once the population was eliminated from the list, we jumped to the next probable cause.

We studied the plans of the above four cities and it revealed some intriguing findings.

We observed that all the well planned cities in the world followed a Grid pattern where, the roads run parallel and across each other. While namma Bengaluru followed a Star pattern. (except in layout areas)