India Part 2: Traffic Madness

The neighborhood where I live is actually pretty nice. There are a few parks, lots of trees, and some of the houses are actually pretty massive, even if the plots are quite compact. Another suburb of Delhi which is a little newer, Noida, is solid apartment blocks, 20 stories or more tall. In Gurgaon, the residential buildings are seldom taller than four stories.

View from my apartment in Gurgaon - P.Salemme

However, one aspect of the neighborhood seems much more urban. Except for very early in the morning, there are literally constant traffic horns going off. While typing this sentence I counted five distinct honkers. If this were New York, you would assume such cacophony to be indicative of complete gridlock. In India however, the use of the horn isn’t a complaint, but more of an indicator that you are on the road. To whom might you indicate your presence? To everybody and everything. Traffic in India is a potpourri of people moving in every imaginable mode of transportation; walking, bicycle, rickshaw, horse-drawn dray, autorickshaw, motorcycle, scooter, car, SUV, heavy truck, and I have seen one of each of the following: huge tractor, steamroller, and a piece of construction machinery the size of a bus on a surface street in Gurgaon. Because there are very few sidewalks to speak of in the older parts of Gurgaon, modes of transportation with very different rates of speed, ex. walking and riding a motorcycle, are mixed together in high proximity. The horn mainly used to let slower travelers know that you intend to pass them. When there is a lot of congestion, however, everybody makes it a point to signal to adjacent motorists that they will be the one going forward, with predictable auditory results.

While there are traffic regulations in the form of painted lines and rush-hour traffic cops directing traffic, there is a pretty loose traffic regime, mostly driven by the ability to pay most traffic cops to look the other way in the case one gets caught. (In their defense, Indian police make very little money.) When stopped for running a red light, an Indian friend of mine recently thanked the police officer for giving him a ticket instead of asking for a bribe. That being the exception rather than the rule, it’s not unusual to see some radical driving behavior, such as people going in reverse on the open highway, stopping in heavy traffic, or driving the wrong way down a frontage road. It works though.

I should qualify that statement by saying that saying that it seems to work based on my first hand experience. The aggregate data seem to tell a different story. In Professor Setty Pendakur’s excellent chapter on non-motorized modes of transportation in Urban Transport in the DevelopingWorld, we learn that as car ownership has increased apace with the Indian economy as a whole, vehicular mortality has skyrocketed, especially in Delhi, which has the highest proportion of car users in India. The number of people killed in car accidents is upwards of 10,000 per year in Delhi alone, over 85 percent of which are not people inside automobiles, but pedestrians or cyclists struck by automobiles. Indeed, the World Health Organization's most recent report on health and human morbidity predicts that automobile accidents will blow past AIDS to become the the number five killer of people in the world by 2030; 90 percent of those deaths will take place in developing countries, despite the fact only half of the world's cars are found there. These figures also neglect to mention the many thousands who are crippled or maimed by cars, and can no longer reliably provide for themselves or their families. While non-enforcement of traffic laws certainly must contribute to such needless tragedy in India, the real culprit is the lack of pedestrian infrastructure in most places. While this may be seen as an unfortunate consequence of new vehicles operating in old places, I was surprised to discover that there was no sidewalk between the parking lot and the shiny, kilometer-long Ambiance Mall in Gurgaon that opened in 2007. Shop at your own risk!

Personally, I am blessed with a fairly short commute; at 2.6 kilometers (1.6 miles), it’s just slightly longer than would be reasonably walkable, especially when there is little to no pedestrian infrastructure and it’s routinely in the upper 90’s by morning commute time. My preferred form of transport is therefore, autorickshaw. These humble green and yellow three-wheelers are pretty ubiquitous and constitute the critical last mile of the commute to the many office workers who take the train to Gurgaon from Delhi or elsewhere. Riding in one is pretty nice; it doesn’t go fast enough to ever feel unsafe (for me or for most of the pedestrians around) and the open sides provide a nice breeze. Fortunately, by law autorickshaws [and municipal buses] must run on less-polluting compressed natural gas, as displayed by a “CNG” decal on every autorickshaw that you see. Supposedly, the implementation of this law improved the air quality in Delhi by 30 percent almost overnight.

 

Autorickshaws - P.Salemme

What has amazed me, in contrast to American taxis, it the amount of customization one can see between autorickshaws. Many are very basic, and some are downright battered, with badly spidered windshields. I have been more impressed by how some drivers have taken pride in their vehicles and decorated the outsides with designs, devanagari script, or a pair of sultry women’s eyes painted on the front or back. [The difference here may between owner-operators and drivers working for somebody else.] My driver this morning had a really nice nice, coffee-colored pleather interior; I felt like I was in a Lexus of autorickshaws. The best ride ever came from a guy who had a sound system rigged up in the back and blasting Indian pop music as he deftly wove his way through traffic on the way home. He even had a LED dome light to help me count out correct change. Not a bad ride at all for about a dollar.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that this past Saturday was a record-breaking scorcher in Delhi- the hottest day in 62 years at 47 Centigrade / about 117 Fahrenheit. Two of my coworkers, completely unbeknownst to each other independently described the heat as "somebody pouring buckets of fire from the sky," and "like Skeletor from He-Man raining fire from the sky." I couldn't make that up.