The buses crawl along in the same gridlock as the rest of the people — far too few and often too full to stop.
Published Aug 17, 2025 | 9:00 AM ⚊ Updated Aug 17, 2025 | 9:00 AM
A BMTC bus. (iStock)
Synopsis: Commuters in Bengaluru have long suffered due to the city’s broken bus infrastructure. Coupled with the ban on bike taxis and systemic issues such as slow-moving traffic, navigating the city has become difficult. Although the BMTC still plans to launch more buses, there has been little progress on route rationalisation.
The bus stop in Mahadevpura in Bengaluru — the Karnataka capital and India’s Silicon Valley — is a caffeine-fuelled tangle of people on Monday morning. At 8 am, commuters crane their necks looking for a big blue bus amidst the sea of cars and autos. They nervously refresh the Namma BMTC app like it might part the traffic for the promised ride. The coffee is getting cold. There are several Slack pings. The bus is late again.
That’s not news. It would be, if the bus were on time. In a city where distance is measured in hours, and where traffic snarls have contributed to memes and stand-up routines for ages, the standard solution of “just take the bus” seems to be about as useful as telling a drowning man to “just swim harder.”
Traffic has gotten worse over the past few months, after the state government banned bike taxis. Suddenly, autos and cabs have become the only available commercial transport options. They are expensive, they are far less efficient at getting through congestion, and at peak hours, they don’t even accept bookings.
At a time like this, Bengaluru should be leaning hard on its almost 7,000-strong BMTC (Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation) fleet. And yet, the buses crawl along in the same gridlock as the rest of the people — far too few and often too full to stop.
In a 2023 study, the Asian Development Bank found that more than 10 buses were plying only on 112 of the 2,203 routes operated by the BMTC. At the same time, 1,500 routes just had one bus each running on them. The report suggested that the corporation come up with a route mapping strategy, so that buses could be deployed as per footfall and rush hours.
Two years later, while the number of buses has gone up, their distribution seems as unscientific as before. Peak-hour crushes on the tech corridor still coexist with ghost routes where a lone bus trundles past half-empty seats.
Aman, who lives in Bellandur, has to travel to Whitefield for work every day — right along the tech belt. It takes about 45 minutes by cab normally. If he took the bus (multiple buses), he would spend twice that time. “It’s not a viable solution. By the time I show up to my office, I’ll be late with no energy left,” he said.
The traffic got so bad last month that the ORRCA (Outer Ring Road Companies Association) had petitioned the tech firms to allow their employees a day of remote work a week. The BMTC had also made some noises about launching air-conditioned buses “tailored for tech workers,” a suggestion which said tech workers felt was not addressing the core issue.
Aman and his colleagues would have been perfectly fine with riding in the existing BMTC buses if they actually showed up and had space. “It’s not that I don’t want to take the bus. It’s that the bus doesn’t want to take me,” he said.
Although the BMTC still plans to launch more buses, there has been little development on the route rationalisation front. Or on the bus lanes front. And experts believe the corporation isn’t even adding buses fast enough.
This is a system which doesn’t operate on a data- or metric-driven process, transport expert Ashwin Mahesh told South First. “Many cities around the world already have a system in place — we need 120 buses per lakh people. By that calculation, this city needs around 16,000 buses. We have less than half the amount. And it’s not like this is rare knowledge, any urban transport planner would know this,” he said.
The BMTC launches buses all the time. Just last month, the corporation added 148 electric buses, bringing the total fleet of e-buses up to 1,584. Very recently, the corporation added 12 feeder buses to work with the new yellow metro line. With new buses being flagged off nearly every month, and plenty of conversations and announcements around ‘sustainable urban mobility,’ the BMTC presents a picture of a transport body dedicated to maximising public transit.
Statistics, however, show just half the story. Given their lifespan and overuse, about 700 buses should be scrapped every year. So the question is — are these shiny new buses really putting more wheels on the ground, or are they just keeping the fleet from decreasing?
In his budget speech this year, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had promised to allocate 9,000 new electric buses to the BMTC under various central and externally aided projects. However, between the fine print, funding crunches, and the glacial pace of procurement, promises like these tend to arrive years late; much like the buses themselves.
The BMTC itself is trying to make up for the shortfall in its own budget. Officials said that while central schemes and externally aided projects might cover the cost of new buses on paper, day-to-day operations — fuel, maintenance and driver salaries — were another story.
Transport experts warn that without dedicated bus lanes, better route planning, and a higher pace of procurement, the bus will remain what it is now — an option in theory, not in practice. “You understand the quandary we are living in,” Mahesh said. “We know how to improve this situation. We just aren’t doing it.”
Back at the Mahadevpura stop, that quandary is playing out in real time. An overly-packed big blue bus finally appears in the distance, 25 minutes late, its destination board flashing hopefully. It drives past the stop without slowing its glacial pace. The coffee is long gone. Slack is still pinging.
(Edited by Muhammed Fazil.)
