On the road in India

I’ve just come back from two weeks working in India, the first in Chennai and the second in Pune. It’s been two years since my last trip to India and I’d forgotten how bad the traffic can be. This entry is an attempt, with some video’s captured on my phone, to describe how interesting driving in Indian cities is.

City traffic in India consists of a mix of pedestrians crossing everywhere, bicycles, bicycle rickshaws, auto rickshaws, motorbikes, cars, crappy old buses, and crappy old trucks. There are heaps of each, all trying to push into any nook and cranny in traffic, even if one’s not there.

Traffic flow and the rules

To imagine the traffic in Indian cities during peak hour: take peak hour traffic in any major city, halve the sizes of the cars, remove an semblance of lane discipline so cars are door handle to door handle, add pedestrians walking both on the side of the road and across through the traffic, add dozens of bicycles, auto-rickshaws and small motorbikes all flitting around into any available gap, and then add slow moving clapped out old buses and trucks to the mix.

Traffic is a constant mix of overtaking with mobile chicanes that may be due to the oxen cart on the verge, four-wheeled carts (flat carts with four bicycle wheels, one on each corner, pushed by people) loaded up with goods, auto-rickshaws suddenly stopping (often without lights) to pickup/dropoff people and buses pulling over. Overtaking is not as simple as one vehicle passing, perhaps nudging over the line. It is a multi-level activity with multiple vehicles overtaking based on size, speed, need and courage. Imagine a bus has pulled almost off the side of the road to let passengers off. You are likely to get a truck trying to overtake it, with cars overtaking the slow moving bus, and then bikes and auto-rickshaws trying to overtake the cars. The success of these activities depends on how wide the road is (or isn’t) and what’s coming the other way.

Right-of-way on the roads seem less about rules and more about what you can get away with. If you can “out chicken” the vehicle coming the other way when overtaking, good luck to you. Merging into traffic from a side road or another lane has little to do with traffic lights or waiting until there is a gap; it’s all about is there anything coming that is bigger than me or that I can’t out bluff. You can rely on people slowing down to let you in, as they don’t want to be in an accident.

The funny thing is that there doesn’t seem to be any animosity. Horns are constantly blaring (or headlights flashing) to tell vehicles you’re coming up behind (infact most trucks have “Horn please” stamped across the back of them as they can’t see behind). But if someone cuts in front of you it seems to be ok; there’s no swearing or “giving the bird”.

Being a biker at home, I’m constantly calculating where vehicles are around me and where they’re going based on speed and direction. The dozen or so vectors are usually manageable. I found myself stressing out in the car, because at any given time there were so many vehicles vehicles appearing and converging on where we were going that my brain couldn’t handle it. I found myself pressing my brake foot to the passenger floor quite often.

A trip to Work

I took a few video’s of parts of the trip to work on a few days. The videos below require Quicktime to be installed in your browser.

First up is a particularly bad road not far from the hotel. This should be a major road joining the centre of the city with Magarapatta City, a large IT and housing estate in Pune’s east. The road is being replaced with a concrete one. So currently there is half of the old road on one side and sections of the new road on the other. This clip shows traveling along the old road side and being pushed into the weeds by oncoming traffic.

This next clip appears to show two lanes of traffic approaching a traffic light, trucks on the left and cars on the right. Have a look half way through where the truck does a right turn from the left lane, then notice the white line in the middle of the road. The cars are actually on the wrong side of the road and then have to scurry across to the left and avoid the trucks at the lights.

Next is the bus terminus near to the office in Pune. I’m sure there’s some organisation to the flow, but I couldn’t see it. As with any terminus, there are many small shops selling all sorts of things, people crossing the roads, and various other forms of transport (jeeps, auto-rickshaws) fightings for custom.

To road leading to the office is quite interesting. One side has the Pune Glider club airstrip with a large wall surrounding it. Along the wall are hastily constructed shacks where the poverty of India hits home. I was impressed to see school kids emerging from the squalor one day in school uniforms heading off to school; hope for the future.

The video shows a number of the clapped out old trucks seen everywhere in India. They don’t look to sturdy, but are beautifully painted and the night lighting would put the cars in “The Fast and the Furious” to shame. Notice about a third of the way through the video where a little 3-wheeled van pulls out into the traffic from the right. We tried to pass it but were outbluffed by the oncoming traffic (I was pressing the imaginary accelerator in the car at that time).

I’ve often said to people that entering the office grounds in Pune is like the film “The Wizard of Oz”. It starts in black and white and then changes to colour in Oz. The road outside is dirty, dusty and drab; the grounds are green with fllowers and trees and well kept.

Driving at night

Driving at night is even more of a challenge, particularly early evening when people are coming home, doing shopping or visiting their temple. There are pedestrians everywhere. Many of the vehicles, such as bicycles, some auto-rickshaws and motorbikes do not have lights, so in the poorly lit areas that can appear out of the darkness very quickly.

This first clip shows the traffic around the bus terminus at about 7:30 in the evening. Notice how any gap you leave in the traffic (I was hoping he’d pass that Tata truck) us quickly swallowed up.

This next clip shows what happens when you slow down near an intersection. We had the right-of-way, there were no traffic lights giving the pedestrians or bikes the chance to cross.

All in all, traveling on the roads in the cities in India is quite an experience. The country is a bit different with slightly higher speeds, but still the cavalier approach to overtaking. Often we were pushed off the road onto the verge as an approaching vehicle was overtaking on our side of the road, and was bigger than us. Yikes.

I suspect Indian drivers have much quicker reflexes than many in western countries. The way they drive seems to work because everyone drives the same way and expects it. If I were to drive there, I’d cause an accident in the first hundred metres. I can’t see that happening.