Over 2 hours to cover 11 km in Bengaluru: Startup founder commits ₹1 crore to fix traffic

Bengaluru

In a bold citizen-led initiative to tackle Bengaluru’s notorious traffic snarls, Prashant Pitti, Co-founder of EaseMyTrip and Optimo, has pledged ₹1 crore to identify and fix the city’s choke-points using AI, Google Maps data, and satellite imagery.

Sharing his frustration after spending over two hours covering just 11 kilometers on Outer Ring Road (ORR) late Saturday night, Pitti recounted being stuck for 100 minutes at a traffic bottleneck that had no traffic light or police presence. “I don’t want to create another traffic meme. I want to fix this,” he posted on X (formerly Twitter).

Pitti is proposing a data-driven solution, leveraging a new feature rolled out by Google Maps in April 2025—Road Management Insight, a BigQuery-format dataset that offers detailed, city-level traffic analytics. By applying machine learning and satellite data, Pitti aims to pinpoint all key traffic choke-points in Bengaluru along with specific congestion timings.

The entrepreneur plans to invest ₹1 crore towards hiring 1–2 senior ML/AI engineers and covering the cost of Google Maps API access, satellite data, and necessary GPU resources. However, he has set one condition for launching the initiative: the Bangalore Traffic Police (BTP) and Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) must open their raw data feeds or APIs and appoint an official team to act on the insights his project generates.

Calling on the public for support, Pitti urged citizens to tag BBMP and BTP officials, connect ML/AI experts who are willing to contribute part-time, and amplify the message to accelerate institutional response. “Bangalore is India’s tech future, and the people making it happen deserve much better,” he said.

As congestion continues to choke the city’s productivity and quality of life, Pitti’s proposal stands out as a rare mix of private initiative and civic engagement, promising real-time, actionable intelligence—if city authorities come on board.

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