Bengaluru Announces No-Traffic Day and Reclassifies the City’s Jams

Bengaluru has announced a citywide No-Traffic Day for the second Sunday, reviving Bus Day, No Honking Monday and Less Traffic Day under a single reporting standard. Instead of asking residents to leave their vehicles at home, the campaign instructs officers to determine the status of everything on the road before deciding whether it qualifies as traffic.

At a junction in eastern Bengaluru, an officer entered a line of stopped private cars as non-reporting units. The bus beside them was recorded as managed mobility, even after its passengers watched the same signal change twice. Yellow-board vehicles received the same designation because they were providing transport, while the police barricade closing an adjoining lane was listed as a fixed safety asset. The form offered no box for the number of people waiting behind any of them.

The new classification reached commuters when a driver who had spent three signal cycles in place requested a delay certificate. A clerk recorded the junction, the vehicle’s operational status and the time of arrival, then returned the form with the delay field blank. The department said a stationary vehicle could be documented without establishing that it had been delayed.

Officers were then told to photograph packed junctions and avoid the word traffic in their captions. One morning image shows commuters leaning from car windows beside a clipboard marked managed mobility, fixed safety asset and non-reporting unit. When the photographs were assembled into the city’s congestion map, Bengaluru appeared green from edge to edge, including the junction shown in the image.

The result changed the work of the traffic control room. Since the map showed no congestion, officers could no longer file a congestion report to explain why they had been standing at the junction. A camera that had recorded 17 minutes of stationary vehicles was removed from its pole and placed in an evidence locker under the label “unverified congestion.”