Traffic stopped completely along the Silk Board Junction-KR Puram stretch of the Outer Ring Road (ORR) for over four hours on Tuesday evening after a BMTC Bus broke down near a busy intersection. This heavily impacted thousands of office workers on their way home. Vehicular movement was already slow because the service road was closed and white-topping work was ongoing on Panathur Road.
BMTC Bus broke down in Bengaluru
The situation got worse around 4:30 PM when a BMTC bus broke down on the down ramp near RMZ Ecospace Tech Park in Bellandur, heading towards Agara. This halted all traffic.
“A crane was sent in, but it couldn’t move the bus forward because the steering was jammed. After a lot of effort, it was finally pulled back and moved to the side,” Karthik Reddy, the Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic), told DH. He noted that the white-topping work on Panathur Road, an important route, had rerouted traffic to the Varthur-Marathahalli stretch.
The road closed on October 6, and the work is set to take another 20 days, he added. “Congestion has already been bad for the last few days due to the white-topping. This incident made it even worse,” he said.
E-buses under scrutiny
The main cause of the heavy traffic jam along the ORR seemed to be the breakdown of an air-conditioned electric bus operated by the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC). Unlike diesel buses, BMTC Bus uses a wet lease model for electric vehicles, paying the manufacturer by kms. The manufacturer is also in charge of bus maintenance and driver deployment.
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