Situation

Once famous as the ‘garden city’, Bengaluru (aka Bangalore) is now notorious for its terrible traffic. It is the baseline against which all other traffic in India is compared.

Infrastructural solutions by the municipal authorities and the state government (flyovers, metro rail) have not kept pace with Bengaluru’s traffic congestion. Many brands have created campaigns around it, comics have written jokes about it, memes and songs abound. But for the world’s second most congested city (Source: TomTom Traffic Index 2022), real change isn’t felt on the ground.

Brief

The Times of India (TOI), India’s largest circulated English daily, had written about Bengaluru’s traffic plenty of times. But this time, just writing was not enough.

The brief was simple:

• Don’t just do a good-looking ad campaign.

• Don’t talk big picture.

• Solve the traffic problem for the people of Bengaluru.

Objective

Real, immediate, measurable impact felt by commuters.

Realizing that there is no big fix or magical solution, we turned to an untapped source – local knowledge. TOI launched ‘Unjam Bengaluru’, a crowd-sourced campaign that invited residents to participate in solving micro-level traffic issues. We created a first-of-its-kind user generated traffic map, hosted on a mobile responsive website, where people could report traffic issues real-time. The traffic department partnered us.

Impact – ‘Unjam Bengaluru’ has generated over 4,000 suggestions from residents, of which 105 have already been acted on by authorities. The best part, authorities acted on 25 of the 105 suggestions before TOI could even report them.

Supplementary results:

• Reach – 18.5M

• Total Engagement – 7M

• Average CTR – 23.12%

The success was so overwhelming that TOI extended its eight-week campaign for more suggestions pour in. TOI even published 25 impact stories to highlight these changes, encouraging further inputs.

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Bengaluru has interesting characteristics that make it a fertile market for the ‘Unjam Bengaluru’ campaign.

• A strong sense of civic duty – The people of Bengaluru are well known for having commitment to actively participating in activities that benefit the local community. They are frequently at the forefront of volunteer initiatives, devoting their time, skills, and resources to numerous causes, from environmental preservation to social welfare – all with the objective of making Bengaluru a better place to live.

• Immense city pride – The people are quick to share their love for the city’s unique blend of tradition and modernity. Whether it’s the city's rich cultural traditions or its café culture, the only blind spot in the people’s pride and civic duty was Bengaluru’s terrible traffic. Somehow, they never saw themselves as part of the solution, until TOI gave them an opportunity to solve this perennial problem.

Bengaluru’s temperate weather and lovely forestation made it a retirement abode. However, India’s burgeoning IT landscape found a base in the “Garden City”, after which there was no looking back. People flocked in from all over, and by 2022, the city and the state of Karnataka together employed 4 million people in the IT industry (Source: The Hindu newspaper).

Unfortunately, the city’s infrastructure never grew with pace. Not only are the small roads not wide enough for heavy traffic, additional construction has also largely been unplanned and is often delayed. Whatever empty areas are left are often occupied by hawkers and vendors. The bad condition of roads and poor traffic management all come together to create the perfect storm for terrible traffic in the city.

But Bengaluru also has an active volunteering culture, where people come together for initiatives. And what better one than to improve Bengaluru’s traffic?