I visited Bangalore last month and let me tell you, it is not just a hype. The ground reality is kinda frightening. On Facebook, I always see memes made on Bangalore traffic and Bangalore airport. After I changed my job in 2020, my new work location was in Bangalore. Thankfully, I am still working from home in my native place but last month, I had to fly to Bangalore to attend an offline office event and that’s when I got a first-hand experience of those memes circulated online.
I landed at 6 AM on a Saturday morning in Bangalore which saved me from the world-famous traffic and it took me a little over an hour to reach my hotel at Shanthala Nagar from the airport. My colleagues who arrived a day earlier were not that lucky as it took one of them 2 hours and another one 2 hours and 45 minutes to reach the same hotel an evening before (peak hours of Friday evening).
Then, from our hotel, the place where the event was happening was a 19-minute walk according to Google Maps. Since we were a little late, we took a cab. It took us 14 minutes to reach our destination. That tells you how the traffic is in Bangalore when the distance you could cover in 19 minutes takes 14 minutes by car.
That was still okay. After the event, we went to a restaurant to celebrate and luckily, that place was very close to my hotel. I checked on Google Maps and the entire road was marked as Red which meant, high traffic on that route. The distance between the restaurant and my hotel was a few hundred of meters and according to the app, it would take 7 minutes by car to reach while by walking, I could reach in 5 minutes. That was the first instance I saw where one could reach the destination faster if they walked — sums up Bangalore traffic for you!
Bittueditx