Driving India Crazy - Indian Driving Schools Articles

Jumping Red Lights!

In Chennai, too, you unlearn the rules as soon as you are out of the VIP roads. A zigzag drive through potholed roads and using hand-signals (to tell those behind you that you have not forgotten to switch off the indicator), I reach a traffic sign that tells me to maintain lane discipline. On Mount Road all vehicles fall in line: buses on the extreme left, four-wheelers in the middle and the two-wheelers and autorickshaws on the extreme right (the fastest lane). This discipline is maintained for about 3 km, at the end of which there is a mad rush to criss-cross to get back to a convenient lane.

Speeds in the city are thankfully low, but youngsters use some roads like the Marina Beach stretch to test their top speeds. The worst traffic jam was in T Nagar. Reason: A funeral procession on the main road. And mind you, the safest mode in Chennai is the public transport-provided you survive the walk to the bus stop.

"Where do we walk," asks K. Satyanarayana, who teaches at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages in Hyderabad. "Pedestrians are treated worse than street dogs. Crossing a road takes me ages. You can be killed any moment." While roads are widened to allow the increase in vehicle population, side-walks for pedestrians have shrunk. The pedestrian's right of way at zebra-crossings is something of a dream.

Youngsters like Sandeep Jajodia of Hyderabad would rather ride their bicycles, but are forced to use "safer" (read public transport) modes of transport because cycling on an Indian road could be the next best thing to suicide. "We are moving towards the west. Why can't we learn from China where even top executives ride their bicycles to office?" he asks. "But the government should first make dedicated lanes for cyclists." But Indian traffic, a joke says, is structured like its caste system: Trucks and buses come first, followed by cars, autorickshaws, cyclists and pedestrians. Nearly 20 per cent of accident victims are pedestrians and another 15 per cent cyclists.

On their part, bus drivers sometimes choose to convert the middle of the road into a stop. Narasimha, the driver of a Road Transport Corporation bus on the undriveable Ameerpet-Kukadpally route in Hyderabad, sits in the dilapidated driver's cabin and demonstrates his driving skills on a 40 degrees Celsius afternoon. "This is my AC, sir," he says, pointing to the noisy engine that radiates heat directly to his body.

Krishna Chaudhary, who lives and drives in Kolkata when she is not visiting her grandchildren in Bangalore, says the drivers of trams, buses and autos ought to get some consideration. "They do nothing else but drive the whole day," she says. "It must be a terrible job." A recent survey on 727 heavy vehicle drivers showed that negative attitudes and psychological stress of drivers caused many accidents.

Mohammed Yousuf drives the much-maligned autorickshaw in Hyderabad's Old City area. "Everyone blames us for chaos. In fact, we reduce traffic jams by driving through any available space on the road," he says. As M.K. Subramanian, secretary of the Automobile Association of Southern India, puts it, "Autos enter with their nose and wedge their way into any available gap on the road". Shivaswamy, 41, of Hiriyur near Mysore, has been a traffic constable in Bangalore for eight years. "We are always told to enforce lane-discipline," he says. "But how can we? People should be given more traffic education." The Institute for Road Transport Education in Delhi had tried to include road safety in the curriculum, says its president Rohit Baluja, but parents, teachers and students did not want another book in the already-heavy schoolbag.

"Much as Indian drivers wish to exhibit good culture, road conditions have not encouraged them to cultivate it," he adds. "The law does not tell you to be courteous. That has to be cultivated by providing the right infrastructure, ideal conditions and proper enforcement." He cites the example of the Mandovi and Zuari Bridges in Goa, where IRTE is implementing a pilot project for highway safety. "First, we set the road engineering right, then we put our cameras in place," he says. "Now nobody drives above the stipulated 30 kmph."

The Kerala government has proposed an overhead high-speed transport system to ease the traffic congestion in Kochi. The Rs 830-crore sky bus project is slated to be a trailblazer not just in transport infrastructure but in safety as well. "At present, a 1 km sky bus project is being implemented in Goa and after studying its results, the project will be implemented in Kochi," says Jiji Thomson, managing director of the Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation. The plan is to introduce this without disturbing the present traffic system. The road network in the city has not increased in proportion to the traffic growth.

Poor infrastructure notwith-standing, most accidents take place because of the driver's fault, says C. Kurien Mathew, who heads the Loss Prevention Association of India's office at Kochi. "This can be reduced by training drivers and enforcing rules."

Dr Reddy believes in ruthless punishment for erring drivers. But according to him the basic flaw is in the process of issuing licences. "Through driving schools, we are only managing the licensing procedure, but not training drivers," he says.

Perhaps, traffic planning too is as whimsical as it is on the road. Dr P.S. Pasricha, director-general of police, Maharashtra, and chairman of the All India Road Safety Programme Implementation Committee, points out that there is a lack of "decisiona-bility" in the area of traffic planning. "In committees, professionals are ignored and self-styled champions of road safety are included," he says. "Seat-belts are required for highway driving. But we implement these piecemeal measures inside cities."

Prof. Dinesh Mohan, Henry Ford professor for transportation safety at IIT, Delhi, agrees with him. "Most countries have a multi-disciplinary approach to traffic planning and road design. It is done by psychologists, engineers, doctors, sociologists and vehicle experts. In India, traffic is still a civil engineering issue."

Dr Thomas Chandy, director of Hospital for Orthopaedics, Sports Medicine, Arthritis and Accident-Trauma in Bangalore, has been campaigning for making helmets compulsory, but in vain. HOSMAT attends to at least 15 accident-trauma cases every day. "People say helmets are expensive, but is it more expensive than life?" he asks. "Over 75 per cent of cases are two-wheeler related. Head injuries are common because helmets are not compulsory. Two such cases are from driving without seat-belts in cars." Add to this self-centredness and lack of civic sense-it is a perfect recipe for disaster.

Drivers in Mumbai are, by far, the best. They maintain lane discipline, slow down at traffic intersections, rarely overtake from the left, and don't encroach on pedestrian crossings, long traffic jams notwithstanding. They don't blind oncoming traffic with high-beam lights thanks to the well-lit roads. Driving through peak hour traffic from VT, Nariman Point, Marine Drive and Malabar Hill, I feel humbled by the good drivers in Mumbai. As I prepare to leave the city, thoroughly impressed, I read a story in a local eveninger. A BEST driver nearly ran his bus over two young men because of a tiff. Ironically, they call it road rage.

By: By N. Bhanutej
Date: July 13, 2003
Source: http://www.the-week.com/23jul13/cover.htm