For the duration of our stay here, we have been provided with a driver and a car. Which is not just a generous gesture; it is more or less essential in order to do the things I am being asked to do: to arrive at school on time, to visit other campuses, to be able to go to the supermarket, or (with a little notice) restaurants in the evening. But it does provide me with a very different perspective on traffic, driving, etc, seeing it from the inside of the car.
What I regard as the utter chaos on the roads here reminds me of Ethiopia (though actually Ethiopia is far more disciplined in this respect.) And it is difficult to describe. Imagine if a road were treated in the same way as we might a busy pavement. In Oxford Street say. People are moving at different speeds. If there is a gap ahead of you, you move quickly into it, especially if you are in a hurry and they are dawdling. If you are more aggressive than others, you can bully your way through. And you would never give way to people coming the other way, unless you were in real danger of colliding with them. Except we are not talking about pedestrians here, but vehicles.
Vehicles such as cars, buses, motor-bikes, tuk-tuks, bicycle rickshaws, schoolchildren on bikes, occasional pedestrians… Plus, being India, (and returning to our Oxford Street analogy, several dogs, the odd cow, and a small herd of buffalo all wandering along the pavement…) Sheer chaos.
But what about driving on the left? Well, it is true that the majority of people do tend to stick to the left (and traffic police certainly enforce this whenever they are around. Which is not all that much.) But, just as in Oxford Street, or the Millenium Bridge in London, where there is a loose instruction to walk on the left, it is a rule which can be broken whenever there is a good reason to do so. Or whenever you feel like it, for that matter.
Traffic lights are common, but the wait between changes is huge, because so many jump the lights early, or late, that you need plenty of time in the time between changes to allow a decent amount of traffic to get through. Plus, of course, you can jump them at any time, if you think no-one is looking; you just squeeze in to the flow. And as everyone does this all the time, no-one gets cross. Or if they do, then tough; I haven’t seen any road rage yet.
Or take roundabouts, also extremely common. At first, I thought they copied the old French way, where the people on the roundabout had to give way to people entering. Which the French eventually abandoned because it can’t work that way. But then I decided it is not as organised or structured as that. It is simply the default position when you allow people to drive until they are forced to stop… right in the middle of the traffic, with people pouring in from the opposite direction. Until you force, or weave, your way through (motorbikes having a particular advantage in this respect, and there are a lot of them.) And as for this strange notion that you should go all the way round a roundabout in order to turn right..! Go the opposite way.
Every day, I am appalled, terrified, amused, intrigued at this crazy approach. And critical too; why can’t they stick to the rules, and avoid the constant bottlenecks. Like we do. But actually, it seems to work, a lot of the time. People do get to work, school, whatever. And I haven’t yet seen an accident (though it has come pretty close.) If the traffic is light, it is actually more efficient; how many of us have sat at a red traffic light, when there is nothing coming.
The trickiest part of our daily journey is when Arvind, my driver, goes through a narrow tunnel under the railway track, wide enough only for one vehicle (though motorbikes can squeeze through in the opposite direction.) And no traffic lights. If you arrive and there is nothing coming the other way, you drive straight through. And anyone behind will follow you through. Traffic coming the other way is forced to wait until there is a break in the traffic, and the first car through leads all the others who have built up behind them. And so on. If the traffic is light, then it works perfectly well.
But the other day, as we were driving through, another car started to come the other way, and both were forced to stop. Cue much beeping of horns, not so much from us and the car facing us, but from all the traffic on both sides who cannot move. In England, there would be a serious altercation – shouting, screaming, fighting. Here, once the car facing us, wo had only just entered the tunnel, realised he was never going to win this battle, he backed up, Or tried to. Because he had a car right up against his bumper (they leave very little room between vehicles in any conditions, but once you have stopped…) Eventually, all the cars heading in the opposite direction squeezed back just enough to allow us to squeeze through (you really have to know the dimensions of your vehicle.
But by now, for this has taken some time, there is a huge backlog of traffic in both directions, so the wait for a gap is even longer. In New York they call this sort of thing gridlock, and it happens relatively rarely. Here they don’t call it anything, because it happens all the time.
