Bengaluru founder shows half-empty office at 10 am, blames city's traffic snarls

A Bengaluru entrepreneur's LinkedIn post showed an empty office at 10.15 am and blamed long traffic woes for delayed arrivals.A Bengaluru founder shared a photo of his half empty office at 10 am and blamed the city's traffic for it. (Photo: LinkedIn/Bala Panneerselvam)At 10.15 am, when most Bengaluru offices are expected to be in full swing, one entrepreneur found his workplace looking almost deserted. His explanation was simple: the city’s traffic is making it harder for people to even reach work with enough energy to do it well.Bala Panneerselvam, founder of Applied AI Studio and the Applied AI Club community, shared a picture of his office on LinkedIn, showing several empty desks.“The problem is not the people. But the effort it takes to show up in the office,” Panneerselvam wrote.He pointed to everyday commutes around Bengaluru to explain the toll. A four-kilometre stretch in the HSR area, he said, can take around 20 minutes on a scooter and 30 minutes by car, with peak-hour traffic adding even more time. By the time commuters reach work, he argued, they are already mentally and physically drained. “And with all the swirling, dodging random two wheelers jumping signals, you're no longer fresh when you reach the office,” he wrote.The journey home, he said, creates another problem. Leaving after 6 pm can mean spending twice as long on the road, while even those who leave around 5 pm reach home too exhausted to enjoy their personal time. That, in turn, affects the following morning, with employees showing up late after another tiring commute. Bala Panneerselvam also shared his own experience, saying it took him two hours to cover the 17-km distance between Whitefield and HSR at 4 pm on a day without rain or any other obvious disruption.“We're absolutely destroying our ability to do good work in this city,” he wrote, questioning how people could find the time and mental space to think when they were constantly overwhelmed by the chaos around them.See the post here:Several Bengaluru residents found the post quite relatable, many of whom shared similar harrowing commute experiences in the comments. Several agreed that long, unpredictable meandering along clogged roads leaves them exhausted before and after work, turning the city’s traffic into more than just a daily inconvenience.- EndsPublished By: Srimoyee ChowdhuryPublished On: Aug 19, 2026 08:30 IST