Bengaluru has the highest number of private vehicles in India, having crossed the 1 Crore mark in 2023. The high number of vehicles, combined with the relentless congestion in the city, has meant that there is also a high number of violations that are observed on the street like wrong-side driving, reckless driving, using mobile phones etc.

It is natural to expect that more vehicles would mean more violations being caught by the traffic police leading to more fines collected each year. The numbers from the Bengaluru Traffic Police paint a more complicated picture.

Traffic Violations

The number of traffic violations are expected to rise with the number of vehicles. Between 2011 and 2017, this is exactly what happened. Since then, the correlation hasn’t been so linear.

2017 was also when the number of cases booked physically by traffic police on the ground peaked. Since then that number has been on a steady decline. The important change that has happened in parallel, is the rise of automation since 2017: violations that are booked using cameras – either by traffic police personnel, traffic signal CCTVs or by the public.

While automation cases were a negligible component of total cases in 2011, since 2023, physical bookings have become a negligible component of cases booked.

Fines Collected

A violation being booked would ideally mean a fine has been collected. This is true where the police catch a violator on the road, book them for the violation and collect the fine. In the case of automation, it means that the fines exist on a server, which people are expected to go look up and pay, which as it turns out, most don’t.

What this means is that while most of the violations have been from automation, the fines realised are from physical on-the-road booking.

Except in 2023, when the traffic police offered a 50% discount on online fines, automation fines have only been a minor component of the total traffic fines. The discount also helped the police realise a whopping Rs. 185 Cr in fines. Since then, however, with the end of the discount, automation fines have gone back to their 2022 levels.

On the road this has meant that violators, including habitual violators have managed to get away without being booked. Recently, a motorist was nabbed who had pending violations totaling Rs. 1,61,000! How this affects road safety is not hard to guess.

Most Common Violations

The most common violations are those that can be easily spotted by cameras – two-wheeler riders and pillions without helmets. They made up close to 64% of all the violations in 2024, followed by wrong parking and jumping signals.

The top 10 violations in fact make up 97.8% of the total and are predominantly automation booked. Except for “No Entry” and parking related issues, automation predominates. As mentioned before, this means that cases are getting logged with no efforts being made to recover those amounts from the violators. In most cases the violators are also not likely to know that they had violated a traffic rule and a fine imposed on them.

Automation vs Physical Booking

The trend since 2017 has been to increasing automation. This has changed the type of violations that get booked. The number of helmetless riding or pillion more than doubled from 2018 to 2022. However, it hasn’t had as much of an increase in catching signal jumpers or wrong parking violations, even though those numbers have crossed a million violations some years!

In parallel, booking of violations that require boots on the ground – reckless driving, lane discipline violations, drunk driving – has been declining. Note the difference in scale in the Y-Axis between this graph and the one above. While lane discipline and drunk driving were being caught and penalised in lakhs in 2018, both have fallen to a fraction of what they were.

“Interceptor” jeeps with speeding cameras completely disappeared from our streets in 2023. The increase in overspeeding violations after 2023 is because of the increase in automation in the form of automated speeding cameras, and is not likely to be a major deterrent in reducing speeds as much as the physical presence of “interceptor” jeeps.

Violations vs Road Safety

The move to automation has helped catch more violations, but it is not getting translated to fines collected from the violators. That the traffic police were able to collect a lot of these fines from the 50% discount scheme over just a few months suggests that people are aware that they are being watched and know where to check. But whether this is translating to regular checking during non-discount months, and most importantly as a deterrent to dangerous on-road behaviour is hard to say. The evidence on the ground does not suggest that it is helping.

There are many cases in social media of violators being caught with large amounts as violations pending. Clearly we need a system where if the violations cross a threshold the violator is brought to book. It cannot be that habitual offenders continue to ply their vehicles on the streets endangering the lives of others, while their fines tab keeps running in the background into lakhs.

The primary goal of booking traffic violations should be road safety. A high number of violations or fines collected cannot be the main target. The latter can be satisfied by flagging the most common violations, like helmetless motorists and pillion riders. That these violations form 64% of the total suggests that this is indeed the case – high number of violations and fines, but little to cheer on the road.

Violations like overspeeding, drunk and reckless driving, that are mostly booked on the road, endanger the lives of other motorists and pedestrians. Most of the violations caught by automation like helmetless driving, wrong parking, safety belts are offences where the safety of only the violating motorist is compromised. The shift to mostly automation at the cost of physical presence on the road has a real consequence on road safety.

It doesn’t help that the number of traffic personnel has remained at less than 5000, while the number of vehicles has risen steadily during this time to reach 1.2 Crores in 2024. The increased congestion in the city also means that most traffic personnel are busy managing the traffic than booking violations. It eventually becomes a vicious cycle – poor driving contributes to congestion, which demands the traffic police’s attention, leaving them less able to address the poor driving itself.