One of the most frequent complaints made by the urban middle class staying in any Indian metropolis is the lack of public transit. “Lack of” is a multi-faceted term, and I wanted to test one element of this issue: Access. My case study is the city of Bangalore.

{Note: I’ve superimposed the lake system in the city, so as to not give a skewed impression of certain regions being devoid of any source of transportation; especially the large section residing on the south-east edge, the Bellandur Lake}

While the public transit system in India may lack elements of reliability, speed, and basic hygiene and cleanliness, my personal experiences with many different systems in India, the US and the UK made me feel that maybe access and frequency of public transit may actually be higher in Indian cities when compared to the other countries.

The images above represent the point locations of bus stops in and near the city of Bangalore. The image on the left is a vast network, highlighting even the path of the national highway system connecting Bangalore with other metropolises like Chennai, Hyderabad, Mysore, and Mumbai. The one on the right is clipped to the ward boundaries of the city of Bangalore. (These boundaries are what were defined in 2012).

I decided to make a heat map and see where there are clusters of the bus stops, and locations where there aren’t a sufficient number of stops. The image below paints a picture of the core of the city being well served, while the peripheries have scanty access to the transit network.

While this might puncture a hole my public transit access hypothesis, the map below reaffirms my belief that nearly the entire city of Bangalore lives within 5 – 7 minutes of a bus stop served by the BMTC network. (This may indicate why the cluster images resemble a large smiley icon)

While this does not in anway speak to the efficient of the existing network, it definitely makes the case for people to think about switching to public transit, especially when pollution levels are reaching the highest limits in various cities in India.

Delhi: pm 2.5 – 998; Bangalore: pm 2.5- 119