On 10th August 2025, Bangalore’s Yellow Line metro was inaugurated, connecting RV Road to Bommasandra , and serving the major tech hub of Electronic City . A week later, we filed a Right to Information (RTI) request with the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL) for data on hourly ridership at each station, from August 1st to 18th.

A month later, BMRCL responded with the requested data. The data includes over 1.2 million rows of data, detailing the number of passengers between each pair of metro stations, at each hour of the day, on each of 18 different days. Here’s a sample of what the data looks like.

The timing of the data captures the impact of the eagerly awaited (and much delayed) Yellow Line. Before the Yellow Line, the city’s network consisted of the west-east Purple Line and the north-south Green Line, which intersect at Majestic . The Yellow Line connects to the Green Line at RV Road , adding a second interchange to the city, and connecting Electronic City to the rest of the city’s metro network. Overlaying the metro network on the city’s urban fabric shows how each line connects areas of varying urban growth and use, from the dense central business district, to various secondary business districts, and developing peripheries.

The granularity of the data helps us understand travel patterns in new ways. For example, in the week following the opening of the Yellow Line, only one person travelled from Beratena Agrahara to Mysore Road . That sole trip was made at 5 PM on August 14th, an hour during which over 300 people travelled from Benniganahalli to Majestic .

1 Person

Travelled from Beratena Agrahara to Mysore Road

300 People

Travelled from Benniganahalli to Majestic

Which parts of the city have been the most enthusiastic about the Yellow Line? Lalbagh has seen it’s average daily ridership increase by nearly 40% since the Yellow Line was opened. On the other hand, a fall in ridership is seen at stations like Chickpete and Banashankari , popular locations to board BMTC buses bound for Electronic City and surrounding areas. Before the Yellow Line, for a person living near Jalahalli and working in Electronic City , the metro covered only a minor part of the journey. Now that the Yellow Line has opened, many such commuters can switch to the metro for a majority of the journey. Overall, Purple Line stations saw a minor impact compared to Green Line stations.

On the other hand, when looking at footfall within stations, the impact on RV Road is immediately noticeable. From previously being one of the lower footfall stations on the network, to now being the sole interchange point between the Yellow Line and the rest of the network, footfall has increased from the earlier 15,000 passengers to now over 75,000 passengers per day. The increase in footfall at Majestic has been more moderate, from 1.8 lakh to 2.1 lakh passengers per day.

The week following the opening of the Yellow Line also coincided with multiple events in the city, including Independence Day celebrations and the Lalbagh Flower Show, which brought additional people to stations like Vidhana Soudha and Lalbagh . The largest unusual spike in ridership was observed on August 16th, coinciding with Krishna Janmashtami, which brought many people to ISKCON, near Mahalakshmi .

People in the city’s peripheries tend to have longer metro commutes, and the opening of the Yellow Line has made the average commute even longer, from 10 stations earlier, to 12 stations after the Yellow Line opened. People at Madavara have the longest average commute of 18 stations, while people at Halasuru have the shortest average commute of 7 stations. In terms of time on the metro each day, a Madavara commuter spends an average of 73 minutes, while a Halasuru commuter spends an average of 27 minutes.

Many of the most popular commutes are much shorter, like the 2nd most popular commute, from Sri Sathya Sai Hospital to Kadugodi Tree Park , a 2 station commute. What is the most popular commute in the entire city? The answer is an indication for what the upcoming Blue Line has in store, as Benniganahalli to Majestic is the most popular commute with over 2500 daily commuters.

Ever wonder where do most people at a station come from and go to? More people at Nagasandra have commutes involving Sandal Soap Factory than any other station. At Indiranagar , there are more commutes involving Benniganahalli than anywhere else. If you want a metro-accessible job near Cubbon Park or Vidhana Soudha , you might move to Indiranagar or Vijayanagara to find neighbours who make the same commute.

The data also allows for an analysis of shared travel patterns beyond a simple ranking of the busiest routes. Since high-traffic stations naturally have high-traffic connections between them, hidden under the surface are connections that are disproportionately important to each other. This “social connectedness” is found by calculating a score for each route that accounts for the overall ridership of both the origin and destination stations. A high score indicates that the passenger flow between the two stations is significantly higher than the average station, like between Trinity and Jnanabharathi .

Same-line trips are consistently more likely than cross-line trips. The hassle of switching at an interchange means that for most stations, the strongest links are usually to stations on the same line. The few cross-line connections that do rank highly represent notable cross-line travel patterns, many of these being work commutes that disappear over the weekend, such as the commute between Trinity and JP Nagar . The rhythm of the metro changes in additional ways between weekdays and weekends. Weekdays show two peaks: one at 9 AM as the city gets to work, and one at 6 PM as it heads home. Weekends replace this bimodal rhythm with a single, broad wave of travel that builds from noon through evening.

Average ridership flow every hour, throughout the day on weekdays vs the weekend

The hourly granularity in ridership shows that there are stations whose weekday rhythm doesn’t closely match the network-wide weekday rhythm. Chickpete has consistently high ridership throughout the day. On weekdays, Majestic and Yeshwantpur wake up the earliest, while Yellow Line stations sleep the latest. On weekends, Yeshwantpur is busiest at 9PM.

Even the network-wide pattern of weekdays being busier than weekends has its outliers. Pattandur Agrahara , Trinity and Indiranagar might be particularly busier on weekdays, but others like Nagasandra and Challaghatta have remarkably consistent patterns between weekdays and weekends. At the other extreme, Chickpete and Sandal Soap Factory are more popular on weekends than on weekdays. Kadugodi Tree Park to Sri Sathya Sai Hospital is disproportionately popular on weekdays, while Chickpete to Majestic is disproportionately popular on weekends.

All the above analysis stems from a single dataset. For organizations such as BMRCL, the takeaway should be obvious, which is to release this data regularly. When data is available and covers a long period of time, it can be used to answer a much wider range of questions, more accurately and with greater detail. You can’t beat the cost of getting analysis and insights from the public, for free. If you are from BMRCL (or another government agency), please consider releasing data like this regularly.

METHODOLOGY