The City That Plans for Traffic, Not People

Introduction

Bengaluru has reached the limit of the number of vehicles its roads can accommodate. Funding for infrastructure remains questionable even as the city works, in fits and starts, to improve its sidewalks and public transport. People still come to India’s Silicon Valley for opportunity but increasingly, participating in that opportunity means owning a vehicle. The question this raises is a simple but urgent one: are we destined to live out our lives inside our vehicles?

Solving Congestion With More of What Causes It

Even as sanctions continue to be issued for tunnel projects worth ₹17,700 crore, the state has earmarked an additional ₹8,000 crore, part of a broader ₹40,000 crore commitment to major tunnel corridors. Allocations of this scale have, paradoxically, coincided with worsening, not improving, traffic conditions for daily commuters.

The obvious question is whether this spending has actually changed anything. The evidence suggests it has not. Every new administration reopens the same roads to lay wires and sewer lines, only to leave them patched and uneven, like scars marking where work once happened. Every monsoon brings a fresh crop of potholes. Every junction becomes a hazard, with no enforcement of traffic laws and no consequences for violations. Footpaths remain absent, leaving pedestrians with nowhere to walk and no safe way to cross.

The state appears preoccupied with managing traffic rather than pursuing the city’s broader development. “Allocation of resources” is a phrase that, in the case of the Karnataka government, requires translation to be understood in practice because with every rupee spent, a portion is lost to corruption, which in turn undermines the quality of infrastructure and the pace of the city’s growth. Roads are retarred every four months, a cycle driven by substandard construction materials and the disproportionate traffic load placed on smaller roads. As a result, funding tends to produce only short-term relief for commuters rather than a lasting improvement to traffic flow or road capacity in congested areas.

The scale of the underlying problem is stark: 1.23 crore registered vehicles are packed onto roughly 15,000 kilometres of road. Vehicle density has risen from 761 to 823 vehicles per kilometre in a single year, with nearly 2,000 new vehicles added to the roads every day. These figures point to a government that has been slow to expand public transport—reflected in five-year delays to metro line construction, an inadequate bus network, a growing reliance on private vehicles, and worsening congestion. Taken together, these factors suggest a city that is planning around its traffic rather than around its people.

Why the Government Doesn’t Take Major Action

The reason Bengaluru’s residents continue to suffer may come as a surprise: there is a financial logic underpinning the city’s vehicle density. Karnataka’s Transport Department is not a minor line item it is one of the five major revenue-generating departments the state relies on, alongside commercial taxes, excise, mining, and stamps and registration, contributing to the roughly ₹1,03,689 crore the state collected in just seven months of 2024-25. Motor vehicle taxation alone was budgeted to bring in around ₹10,500 crore for 2023-24, a target the department has a track record of exceeding. Crucially, this money is not ring-fenced for roads or public transport in any binding way — vehicle tax and registration fees flow into the state’s general revenue, to be spent according to political priority rather than legal obligation. And political priority is stretched thin: the state’s flagship welfare guarantees alone cost an estimated ₹60,000 crore a year, even as revenue transfers from the central government have been shrinking under the post-GST framework. In that context, motor vehicle taxation isn’t just a revenue source — it’s one of the few levers the state can pull on its own, without Delhi’s cooperation, and one that grows automatically as more vehicles are sold. That is the dependency worth naming: not that the government collects a certain sum from vehicles and therefore owes an equivalent sum in traffic relief, but that a state under fiscal pressure has little incentive to shrink a tax base that expands every time someone in Bengaluru buys a car.

Consider the structure of that taxation. Goods and Services Tax (GST) is built into the ex-showroom price of every vehicle: small cars (under four metres, with small engines) attract an 18% rate, while larger cars, luxury vehicles, and SUVs are taxed at 40%. Electric vehicles receive a preferential rate of 5%. Two-wheelers up to 350cc are taxed at 18%, with larger models taxed at 40%.

On top of this base rate, a compensation cess of 1% to 22% may apply to certain non-EV or larger vehicle segments, depending on type, size, and engine capacity. Buyers also pay a one-time road tax and registration charge at the Regional Transport Office (RTO), typically 5% to 20% of the vehicle’s cost, varying by state and by whether the vehicle runs on petrol, diesel, or electricity. Purchases exceeding ₹10 lakh incur an additional 1% Tax Collected at Source (TCS), and car insurance premiums carry their own 18% GST charge.

In the 2025–26 financial year, Karnataka’s Transport Department collected ₹12,829.64 crore, just short of its ₹15,000 crore target, out of an estimated ₹315,050 crore in total state revenue receipts. The inaction, then, is not a reflection of indifference to the public. It is a function of how heavily the state budget depends on vehicle-related revenue.

What Action Should Be Taken

As residents of this city, we are entitled to ask whether this level of spending is justified if it fails to fix the underlying problem. With roughly ₹15,000 crore collected annually in vehicle-related taxes alone, why not direct a portion of it toward a one-time, targeted investment in roads, public transport, traffic flow, footpaths, and road widening?

Such an investment would not need to be repeated every year at the same scale; tax revenue could instead be reallocated more efficiently going forward, improving traffic conditions and allowing residents to travel faster and with less friction. In a fast-growing economy like Bangalore’s, one increasingly defined by its technology hubs and its identity as India’s Silicon Valley, the investments made today will determine how quickly and how well the city develops tomorrow.

The longer this is delayed, the more residents will suffer, and the more indifferent the government will appear to that suffering. A single, well-directed investment of vehicle tax revenue could change that trajectory. The remaining question is simple: why hasn’t it happened yet?