It’s fascinating to watch the ebb and flow of traffic in Bangalore. Here’s an animation of the Monday traffic at the Silk Board junction, which is notorious for congestion.
Through the night, the traffic is fairly slow. But from around 5:00am, a slow build-up of traffic starts from the south. This is mainly the commercial and bus traffic from Tamil Nadu entering Bangalore, to the point that there is a jam on Hosur Road by 5:30am. This stabilises by around 6:30am though.
Up to 7:30am, the junction is fairly free. From then on, the heavy traffic builds up on the east-west Outer Ring Road. Eastward traffic from BTM layout and Westward traffic from HSR layout get bottleneck-ed at the signal. The north-south Hosur Road is relatively free.
But by 8:30am the signal is completely choked and stays that way through the morning.
This continues until post-lunch, when the traffic gently lets up. At 2:30pm, Silk Board isn’t dangerous.
But by 3:30pm traffic starts building up again to the point that by 5:30pm the signal is completely choked.
By 6:30pm, Silk board is a signal you don’t want to cross. It would save you an hour to get off your vehicle, walk a kilometre across the signal, and get into another vehicle.
By around 11:00pm, the traffic has let off.
Sunday Traffic
On the other hand, Sunday is a significantly better experience. There’s really heavy traffic only between 5:00pm to 8:00pm.
About the images
We used Selenium to take screenshots of Bangalore traffic every 5 minutes from Google Maps and animated these. ImageMagick helped crop to Silk Board and animate it as GIFs.
