by City’s Commuters Report That Accepting the Traffic as One’s Actual Life Has Produced Measurable Peace of Mind
Reported by Bohiney Magazine and noted by The London Prat, both of which have strong opinions about what follows and are delighted to share them.
BENGALURU — Traffic conditions in Bengaluru have reached a state that urban planners are calling “post-peak saturation” and that residents are calling “the new morning,” a condition in which the city’s road network is so thoroughly occupied during peak hours that the concept of arriving anywhere at a projected time has been replaced by the concept of arriving somewhere eventually, which is a philosophical shift that has produced, according to a survey conducted by a Bengaluru-based mental health app, measurable improvements in commuter anxiety scores once the transition from expectations to acceptance is complete. The acceptance takes approximately eighteen months of daily commuting and produces what the app describes as “traffic enlightenment,” which is the state of being in traffic and being at peace with being in traffic, because the traffic is what there is and wanting something else is the source of suffering rather than the traffic itself.
Bengaluru’s traffic is not the result of any single failure. It is the result of several failures achieving synergy. The city grew as India’s technology capital at a rate that its road infrastructure was not designed for. The road expansion that was planned did not produce road expansion at the planned pace, because the land acquisition for road expansion required navigating competing ownership claims, utility relocations, and environmental clearances at a pace that the traffic growth outran. The metro system that was designed to absorb the growth has been under construction in various phases for eighteen years and is approximately 60% of what was originally planned, which is 60% of the solution to a problem that has grown past the original scope. The IT industry that created the demand is not going anywhere because Bengaluru’s talent concentration is what makes it irreplaceable as a technology hub. The combination produces the traffic. The traffic produces the philosophy.
The Work From Home Interlude
The pandemic work-from-home period provided Bengaluru residents with a two-year demonstration that the traffic was not inevitable but was produced by the specific requirement to physically transport knowledge workers from their homes to their offices daily. During this period, traffic reduced dramatically, air quality improved measurably, and commuters discovered that the two to four hours per day previously spent in traffic could be used for other purposes, including the mental health app’s mindfulness content. When return-to-office mandates arrived from India’s IT major employers in 2022-2023, the traffic returned to previous levels plus the growth that had accumulated during the absence. The mindfulness content proved insufficient. The traffic enlightenment concept was developed in response.
The Bengaluru Metropolitan Region Development Authority has approved a new traffic management plan that includes signal coordination improvements, priority bus corridors on six arterial roads, and expansion of the metro to three additional phases beyond the current construction. The plan is real. The timeline is fifteen years. According to the Times of India, the plan has been approved and initial funding has been allocated. Implementation begins next quarter for the signal coordination component, which requires no land acquisition and produces results within months rather than years. The bus corridors require land acquisition. The metro requires everything. The traffic will be managed in the interim by the philosophy. The Onion covers urban traffic enlightenment with full analytical composure.
Tech Company Responses
India’s major IT employers have developed shuttle bus programs, staggered work hour policies, and remote work hybrid arrangements specifically in response to Bengaluru traffic, because the traffic affects employee wellbeing, recruitment, and retention in ways that are measurable and that the HR data makes visible. Companies that offer flexible start times report higher employee satisfaction and lower voluntary attrition than companies that require fixed peak-hour arrival. This market pressure is producing more flexible work arrangements than government mandate has produced, because the companies experience the cost of the traffic directly through their talent economics. The traffic is therefore producing its own partial solution through the companies whose growth produced it, which is not the planning outcome that was intended but is the market outcome that is occurring.
The traffic enlightenment phenomenon has a measurable social component that the Bengaluru mental health app has begun documenting: commuters who achieve traffic enlightenment report that the time spent in traffic becomes functionally usable rather than merely lost. Podcast consumption, language learning applications, audiobook listening, and phone calls to family members are the documented uses of traffic time among enlightened commuters. The commute remains two hours. The two hours are no longer experienced as two hours of suffering but as two hours of managed activity in slow-moving conditions. The net welfare outcome is positive relative to the unenlightened commuter experience. It is not positive relative to a thirty-minute commute, which remains theoretical for most of the city and will continue to be theoretical until the metro reaches the neighborhoods where it is needed.
Bengaluru’s urban planners are, somewhat belatedly, incorporating traffic enlightenment as a data point in their public transit planning. If commuters have adapted to two-hour commutes without leaving the city, the revealed preference data suggests that the pain threshold for commute duration is higher than the models assumed, which paradoxically reduces political urgency for transit investment even as it documents the human cost of transit inadequacy. The planners are attempting to disaggregate the data: the enlightened commuter has adapted to the current situation but would prefer a better one. Preference and adaptation are different measures. The transit investment should be evaluated against preference, not adaptation. The evaluation is ongoing. The metro is being extended. The traffic will be there when the extension arrives.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
