Two cab rides, same day. Same category of vehicle, a plain sedan, nothing special either end. One route: Ahangama to Colombo airport, roughly 120 km, done in two hours. The other, a few hours later on the same clock: Bangalore airport to home, 58 km, took an hour and a half. If this were purely a distance versus time argument, Sri Lanka wins by a landslide and there’s nothing more to say. But that’s not the story. The story is that I did not feel a single thing on that Sri Lankan drive. No tension in the shoulders, no gripping the door handle, nothing. The Bangalore leg, less than half the distance, left me feeling like I need another vacation to recover from it.
Similar car. So it wasn’t the vehicle. It was everything happening around it.
Bangalore has earned this feeling honestly. The city ranked second most congested in the world in the 2025 TomTom Traffic Index, just behind Mexico City, with congestion levels touching 74.4 percent. Average peak hour speeds sit somewhere between 14 and 17 kmph, which is a brisk cycling pace dressed up as a car journey. Commuters here lose close to 168 hours a year just sitting in traffic. That’s a full week of annual leave, except instead of a beach you get an auto rickshaw’s tailpipe six inches from your window.
None of that fully explains the airport run though, since that hour had relatively open roads. What it doesn’t have is any semblance of lane discipline. Every stretch becomes a live negotiation. Lanes are suggestions. Indicators are theoretical. The horn isn’t used to warn, it’s used to announce presence, intent, mild irritation, and existential frustration, often in the same three second burst. A two wheeler will find a gap that doesn’t exist and manufacture one anyway. Everyone is driving with an urgency that put Kylian Mbappé to shame towards the final leg of their semi-final clash against Spain.
Now the Sri Lankan expressway. The Southern Expressway from Colombo toward Galle and beyond runs at a strict 100 kmph, monitored by CCTV and patrolled by a dedicated Special Task Force whose entire job is making sure people don’t get creative with lane usage. The rule is almost insultingly simple: outer lane to drive, inner lane to overtake, then get back out. That’s it. That’s the whole system. And because everyone actually follows it, nobody needs to make split second gambles about who’s cutting across three lanes to catch an exit. The road behaves the way roads are supposed to, like an agreement everyone signed rather than a battlefield everyone’s defending.
Here’s the part that should sting a little. Sri Lanka went through a full blown economic collapse in 2022, fuel queues, currency crash, the works. India’s economy, and Bangalore’s tech money in particular, dwarfs it by every measure that matters. And yet the poorer country’s cab ride felt like a country that had its act together, while the richer one felt like an argument that never quite resolved. This isn’t a GDP problem. You can’t out earn your way past bad lane discipline. It’s an enforcement and culture problem, and those are considerably harder to fix than a road surface.
I’m not pretending to have the policy answer here. I don’t think anyone does, given how many attempts Bangalore’s civic bodies have already made and quietly abandoned. But there’s something almost funny about needing a whole different country’s traffic system to remind you what calm feels like. Two sedans, same day, same passenger, same general mood walking in.
One route covered twice the distance and asked nothing of me. The other covered half of that and asked for a full recovery period.
