Traffic Insanity in Bangalore

This place is a fucking trip. The worst is the traffic. It is Rollerball and everyone is James fucking Khan.

There are lanes painted on the asphalt, but people could give a shit about all that. Cars swerve without signaling. Motorcycles and scooters swarm like locusts everywhere. If there is the slightest gap between cars or buses or trucks it is immediately filled by a two wheeled vehicle. There are almost no official road rules. It is rare to see a stop light and even rarer to see someone stop at one.

Motorcycles and scooters are in a world of their own. I see people text messaging while they are riding or shoving their phones under their unfastened helmets to chat while navigating this internal combustion madness. Riders of bikes are required by a law only just passed to wear helmets but not their passengers. Many folks wear hard hats as helmets. For those of you who are not in the know, hard hats are not safe for cycles.

People often have their entire families on scooters. It is a common sight to see 4 people on a scooter. Little babies, women in saris riding side saddle. One thing I thought while watching all these women riding side saddle was “how do they stay on the seat?” None of the passengers are wearing helmets. And people carry anything and everything with them on a scooter or motorbike. Furniture, supplies, goats. I saw a scooter drive by with two goats wedged between the rider and his passenger.

Horns blare without cease; everywhere and always. Because there are no rules of driving to count on you have to make sure that people know where you are or else you will get run over. This means that people are constantly honking. At first it is unbearable and eventually it is just background noise. Many trucks have "horn please" painted on their rear bumper.

Being a pedestrian in this environment is an adventure in itself and the threat of immanent doom is constant. If waiting for a break in the seemingly endless stream of cars is not an option, people will just stick out their palm in a “talk to the hand” type of motion and hope that is enough to keep from getting run over by the madmen and women who are bearing down on them. I have to admit, however, that there is something exciting and entertaining at having to fend for yourself in such an environment.

The sidewalks, when they exist, are curiously antithetical to walking. They are at least a foot up from the ground and made of unevenly set blocks of thin concrete. At times they are even highter and require steps to climb up them. Some of the concrete is broken to reveal gapeing pits beneath them (usually filled with trash).