On Thursday evening, students returning home from schools in the Varthur and Gunjur areas of Bengaluru faced severe traffic congestion. Parents reported that many students were stuck in traffic for over two hours while traveling just five to six kilometers. This situation highlights ongoing issues with traffic management in the region, particularly during peak school hours.
School buses from several institutions took over two hours to cover the short distance on Thursday, according to details shared by parents in residents’ groups. Several school buses were among the vehicles caught in the gridlock. One parent, Ritish Reddy, CEO and Co-founder of Zluri, went looking for his daughter after tracking the GPS location of her school bus. He filmed the massive traffic pile-up, showing dozens of school buses stuck on the road.
The traffic chaos was reported along SH-35 near Gunjur, on the stretch leading towards Varthur. School bus commute times reported on September 17: Meanwhile, Nooraine Fazal, founder of Inventure Academy, said children and teachers spent as much as seven hours on the road travelling to school and back home on Thursday.
Among the measures she suggested were keeping heavy vehicles off key roads during school peak hours, enforcing penalties for wrong-side driving and other traffic violations, incentivising school buses and shared transport over individual vehicles, and collecting real-time mobility data to use simulation and “what-if” analysis to determine optimal school and office timings.
