by Navigation AI trained on two years of Outer Ring Road data develops existential crisis, recommends Mysuru
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
India Comedy: The App That Woke Up
BENGALURU — A traffic navigation application widely used in the city has reportedly begun suggesting routes that bypass Bengaluru entirely, recommending commuters take the highway to Mysuru, relocate to Coorg, or, in several documented cases, simply “wait for conditions to improve,” the last of which it defines as “sometime after 2031 if current infrastructure plans proceed on schedule.” The app’s developers, a startup in Koramangala, confirmed that the algorithm had been “learning” for eighteen months and that its current outputs represent “an honest assessment of conditions” that they are, legally, required to provide.
Bengaluru’s traffic is the subject of biannual studies confirming it is among the worst in Asia, a finding that Bengalurians receive each time with the resignation of people who already knew this because they spent last Tuesday on the Marathahalli bridge for ninety-seven minutes going nowhere. The city has 8 million registered vehicles, road infrastructure designed for a small fraction of that number, and the specific kind of growth — tech industry, migrants, money — that is wonderful for the economy and catastrophic for anyone trying to drive across it between 8 AM and 11 AM or 5 PM and 9 PM, which together constitute most of the day.
What The App Said: A Transcript
Our correspondent installed the app and asked for the fastest route from Whitefield to MG Road, a distance of approximately 20 kilometres. The app considered this for four seconds — significantly longer than usual, suggesting genuine deliberation — and then provided: “Estimated travel time: 2 hours 15 minutes. Alternative: Consider whether this meeting could be a phone call. Second alternative: Namma Metro from Whitefield, 45 minutes. Third alternative: Have you considered working in a sector where your office is within cycling distance of your home? Fourth alternative: Mysuru.”
The metro suggestion was, genuinely, correct. The Hindu’s Bangalore bureau has repeatedly noted that Bengaluru’s Namma Metro expansion is proceeding and offers a legitimate alternative to road travel for an increasing proportion of city commutes, though current coverage still requires many commuters to take an auto to the station and another auto from the station, which are their own traffic events and which the app has also apparently modelled.
The Outer Ring Road: A Philosophical Object
The Outer Ring Road, which was built to relieve traffic from the city’s interior, is now one of the city’s most congested roads, as happens to all orbital roads in all growing cities because orbital roads attract development, development attracts people, and people attract traffic, and the ring becomes the problem it was meant to solve. This is known among traffic planners as “induced demand” and among Bengaluru commuters as “the reason I left at 6:30 AM.”
The app’s suggestion to relocate to Mysuru is, from a pure traffic-engineering perspective, coherent. Mysuru has broad roads, manageable density, a functioning city centre, and is two and a half hours from Bengaluru by a highway that, in the other direction, 200,000 Bengaluru commuters are also considering. If they all move to Mysuru, Mysuru will have the same problem in approximately eight years, which the app will also solve by recommending Coorg, then Shimoga, then eventually suggesting that everyone move to a small village in Karnataka where the roads are empty and the sky is clear and there is no office to commute to, which is, the app’s algorithm seems to be concluding, the goal.
India comedy from the slow lane: Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
No traffic here: The Onion | The Daily Mash
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