Metro Services and Their Impact on Bengaluru and Hyderabad Traffic

While there has been a long-standing competition between the capital cities of Karnataka state, and now Telengana state, urban development in both Bengaluru and Hyderabad have had an adverse effect on the ease of commuting in these cities. Now, with the addition of metro rail services in the last couple of years, a recent study by Uber Movement has shown that there is some improvement in the time it takes to travel between places in the city. However, there are still many improvements to be made, and with both these projects still operating in their early phases, it remains to be seen how much of the issues will be positively dealt with in future, as they continue to increase in intensity.

Namma Metro, as the metro rail service in Bangalore is called, has been able to reduce commute times significantly over a six-month period, according to the report compiled from data on the Uber Movement database over a two-year period. This is similar to the improvements seen in Hyderabad, with some differences between both of these cities, for obvious reasons. In the case of Bengaluru, both the Purple Line and Green Line cater to areas that experience a significant flow of daily traffic with the first catering to people travelling between Vijayanagar and Indiranagar, and the second taking care of JP Nagar and Malleshwaram. In the case of Hyderabad, however, the most significant flow of traffic is to Hitec City, which is not connected to the metro rail service as of now.

These mass rapid transit systems are still, in spite of delays, very much in their early stages. Yet, what is becoming increasingly clear is that a combined impetus for positive change will come from a multi-pronged viewpoint, which will involve studies such as this to identify commuting patterns, and the ability of mass rapid transit to scale up to be useful to a steadily growing urban population.