Bengaluru Traffic: A Daily Near-Death Experiment

Bengaluru Traffic: A Daily Near-Death Experiment

Yesterday was a holiday.
Naturally, I went to work.

I was riding to IISc to work on a hydrothermal dataset. Eight kilometers. That’s it. Recently, I bought a motorcycle — a long-delayed dream. I’m 36 years old as I write this. It took me years to justify owning a bike, and longer to save for one.

It’s a humble machine. A TVS Ronin 225. About 20 horsepower. No racing fantasies. No midlife crisis. Just a clean, honest motorcycle.

I enjoy riding it.

Which is unfortunate — because Bengaluru traffic has made enjoyment a dangerous hobby.

Every ride here feels like Russian roulette.
The revolver has wheels. And it honks.

People are always in a hurry. Always.
Not purposeful hurry — just chaotic impatience.

Auto drivers turn without looking. Cars block main roads because they want to turn — right of way be damned. Picture a T-junction: you’re moving straight, legally, calmly… and someone just parks their vehicle sideways like it’s a philosophical statement.

You brake. Or you die.

Overtakes happen with an inch of clearance.
One inch.

That inch is the difference between me reaching work and becoming tomorrow’s headline. This isn’t poetry — it’s physics.

Turn indicators here are decorative.
Rear-view mirrors are cosmetic accessories.
Traffic rules are… more like gentle suggestions.

I ride at 25, sometimes 30 km/h. That already makes me an obstacle. Others fly past at 70 or 80 on roads that are narrow, broken, crowded, and alive with unpredictability. Children walk here. People cross wherever survival instincts allow.

Nobody cares.

Everyone thinks they’re in Formula 1.
The only difference is — the podium is usually an ICU bed.

And then, as if the universe wanted to underline the point, I read the news.

A woman riding a scooter with her daughter was hit by a speeding car.
The mother died.
The daughter survived — barely.

Here’s the report, if you want to read it without flinching:
https://www.deccanherald.com/india/karnataka/bengaluru/woman-killed-as-car-rams-their-scooter-techie-daughter-survives-3874675

This wasn’t a freak accident.
This wasn’t bad luck.
This was Bengaluru traffic functioning normally.

Every day, someone’s mother, father, or child is fed into this machine. We call it “unfortunate” and move on. The system absorbs the body and continues.

What kind of streets are these?
More importantly — what kind of minds are allowed to operate vehicles here?

Driving licenses test vision and reflexes. They don’t test temperament. In the army, psychological screening is mandatory — because impatience plus power kills people.

A vehicle is power.

If you cannot wait five seconds, you should not be trusted with something that can erase a human life in half a second.

Every day I ride, my heart briefly stops — then resumes. A sudden swerve. A blind turn. A reckless overtake. I don’t remember the last commute without at least one near-death calculation.

I recently moved back to Bengaluru from Germany. There, traffic dissolves into the background of life. Here, it hijacks your nervous system. You are alert, tense, constantly simulating worst-case scenarios like a malfunctioning AI.

Statistically speaking, if I live long enough here, I will die on these roads.

That’s not drama.
That’s probability.

I haven’t achieved much yet. I want to do meaningful science. I want to contribute something real. Strengthen this country in the only way I know how — slow, careful, long-term work.

But will I be alive long enough?

Killed by whom?
Not terrorists.
Not war.
Not disease.

Impatient people.

Mostly auto drivers. Cab drivers. Private car owners with divine urgency. I often want to ask them: what exactly is the emergency? Are you responding to a national crisis? Will you be handed the keys to an F-22 or an F-35 if you shave off ten seconds?

No.

You’ll still be an auto driver.
Still stuck.
Still angry.

If you want progress in life, learn patience first. Speed without patience doesn’t get you ahead — it just ensures collateral damage.

This city doesn’t have a traffic problem.
It has a psychology problem.

And I believe there is a way to deal with it.
Not violently. Not illegally.
But in a way that forces reflection.

It’s unconventional.
And it might actually work.

What I am about to say will make people uneasy.

Civilization has never advanced by waiting for polite behavior to magically appear. It advances when bad behavior becomes inconvenient.

Right now, we punish traffic violence after someone dies. That is not justice — that is paperwork.

Reckless impatience is not random. It is observable, repeatable, and predictive. The same people cut lanes. The same people honk at red lights. The same people treat public roads like personal timelines.

Tomorrow, one of them will kill someone.

So here is the uncomfortable thought:
What if we intervened before that happened?

History gives us examples of behavioral control used for terrible purposes — wartime surveillance, authoritarian social discipline, coercive monitoring. Those systems were evil not because they influenced behavior, but because they were opaque, unaccountable, and violent.

Tools are not moral. Intent and oversight are.

Now imagine a system that does the opposite.

No violence.
No illegality.
No touching.
No threats.

Only patience.

Imagine a government-run unit whose only job is to neutralize dangerous impatience on the road — not by fines, not by force, but by lawful obstruction.

Detection is the easy part. We already have the data.

Cameras. Speed sensors. GPS traces. Dashcams.
Machine learning models that don’t care about excuses — only patterns.

Who consistently drives at 60 or 75 km/h on narrow roads?
Who tailgates, accelerates aggressively, cuts lanes, ignores gaps?
Who behaves like the road owes them time?

This isn’t speculation — it’s classification.

The same way we flag credit risk or disease outbreaks, we can flag behavioral risk. Not once. Not on a bad day. But repeatedly. Statistically. Predictively.

Once a driver crosses a threshold, the system doesn’t punish them.
It prepares for them.

The next morning, when that person starts their vehicle from home, a different system wakes up too.

A small, trained unit is deployed ahead of them.
Perfectly legal vehicles.
Perfectly calm drivers.
Perfectly obedient to traffic rules.

They do not chase.
They do not harass.
They simply appear… ahead.

They drive at the speed limit. Exactly.
They stop fully. Every time.
They indicate early. Always.
They leave safe gaps. Religiously.

To an impatient driver, this feels like psychological torture.

To the law, it is flawless behavior.

No rules broken.
No grounds for complaint.
Only a mirror.

The reckless driver honks. Rages. Seethes.
Nothing changes.

Day after day, the same lesson:
You cannot dominate a system that refuses to react.

This is not punishment.
This is retraining.

If someone cannot tolerate lawful patience for ten minutes, they should not be trusted with a two-ton machine capable of ending a life.

This is not about revenge.
This is about prevention.

We already accept psychological screening in the military, aviation, and nuclear facilities. Roads kill more people than all three combined.

Yet we hand out licenses without asking the simplest question:

Can you wait?

If the answer is no — society has a responsibility to slow you down.

Update — Second Iteration (February 7, 2026)

After sitting with this idea for a while, I need to admit something uncomfortable.

I don’t think the psychological monitoring approach I described above would work in Bengaluru — or in much of urban India.

The premise of that solution assumes that reckless impatience is a minority behavior: a deviation that can be corrected by social friction and reflective feedback. That assumption is false here.

In Bengaluru traffic, impatience is not an anomaly. It is the dominant mode.

A large fraction of road users behave this way — not maliciously, but mechanically. They are not reacting anymore. They are operating on autopilot, like zombies following a script written by density, stress, and habit. When everyone around you is aggressive, lawful patience no longer teaches a lesson — it becomes background noise.

Behavioral nudging works when rule-breakers are rare.
Here, rule-followers are.

In lower-density regions, reckless drivers exist too — but like tigers, they are dangerous precisely because they are scarce. In Bengaluru, they are mosquitoes. Individually insignificant. Collectively lethal.

So I no longer believe selective psychological retraining scales in an environment like this. It would require an enforcement apparatus so vast that it would resemble occupation, not governance — an entire continent’s worth of intervention for one city.

That forces a harder conclusion:

The problem here is not psychology. It is physics.

If human behavior cannot be trusted, then agency must be removed.

A more realistic solution is not monitoring people — but constraining machines.

Private vehicles sold today can exceed 100–200 km/h. This makes no sense in a dense city where survivable collision speeds are below 30 km/h. Power without context is just deferred violence.

A better approach would be mandatory, location-aware speed and acceleration limiting:

• City zones capped at ~25 km/h
• Engine power and throttle response restricted via ECU
• GPS-based geofencing enforced at the vehicle level
• No opt-out, no override — like UPI, but for kinetic energy

When you leave the city, limits lift.
When you enter it, physics takes over.

This does not require judging intent.
It does not require monitoring temperament.
It does not require hoping people behave better.

It simply makes lethal impatience impossible.

This is not elegant.
It is not libertarian.
But it is survivable.

I plan to write a longer monograph exploring this idea — technical, ethical, and political — in more detail. This section stands as a correction, not a retreat.

Sometimes the second solution is better precisely because the first one failed in reality.