+ Rant on Civic Behaviour - 3

More traffic nonsense has been perpetrated on Bangalore in the last one month or so. Autorickshaw lanes. This is actually Act 2; Act 1 started quite a few months back with Bus lanes. After the initial media hullabaloo from the guys in charge, it was given a quiet burial – as usual.

The pattern is always sickeningly similar. Talk initially as if it is the most revolutionary thing that has happened in India in the last few decades. A month or so on, it finally dawns on everyone that it was just another daft idea.

To digress, about three months back, they had dug up the “free left” part of the junction near the Indian Express office. It lay dug up for a few weeks. Then some commissioner or someone from one of the departments responsible for the thing spouted in the newspapers that it was just a niggling little problem with supply of materials of something of that sort, and that the surface would be ready for use in the next 15 days. Two months, I thought. And it was!

Going back to autorickshaw lanes, a few issues:

Are autorickshaws the only slow-moving vehicles on the road? I constantly see slow moving trucks hogging the middle of the road.

How do you tackle junctions? As it is, you have all sorts of idiots turning routinely from the left lane to the right, and from the right lane towards the left.

Why would anyone on earth earmark an entire lane for autos, while leaving only two for all the other vehicles together? On Cubbon Road, close to two lanes have been given over out of a manageable four – including one for parking, I presume, though how anyone would reach that lane is anyone’s guess.

Bangalore’s traffic will never improve. Because, one, drivers don’t care a hoot for rules, and there is nobody to make them. There is a pedestrian in front of Wockhardt Hospital on Cunningham Road, and in the last six days, I haven’t seen even a dozen vehicles - in all the time I have stood to cross the road – I haven’t seen even a dozen vehicles stop for a pedestrian green signal. This happens routinely at the Cantonment railway station pedestrian signal, too. Every pedestrian green signal at Queen’s junction on M G Road sees at least 20 guys driving on even as people are crossing the road. On top of this, there is generally a twit of a traffic constable who turns a blind eye, or horrifically worse, actually waves the vehicles on.

The less said about the pathetic flyover projects, the better. This is one of those fantastic places where a flyover takes two and a half years to complete. And ditches take forever to be covered. And two-wheelers always get the better of traffic jams because they take to the pavements by the dozens.

The only way to rectify the situation is to go back to the basics and force people on the road to follow the fundamentals.

Slow moving vehicles on the left
No talking on the mobile phones while driving
No cutting signals
No waltzing across lanes at junctions
No parking at junctions
No double parking
And so on...and so on....

But who the hell is listening?!