Saturday NIGHT (a)LIVE??????????????

Saturday evenings are perfect for relaxing drives with your family or friends but as most city slickers would agree with me, it is not so. There is so much traffic on city roads that even the flyovers are jammed with vehicles and I always thought flyovers were built to ease traffic congestion. India’s car market is booming at a rate that is keeping carmakers happy and the average Indian driver very very tense.

Today’s cars boast of the latest technologies, and are marketed with swanky acronyms (e-this and e-that) but one problem that carmakers can’t provide with their cars is parking space. Carmakers could guarantee you with economy, style, safety and value for money but not parking space.
Moreover big cars being status symbols in India only makes things worse. You see a big car occupies more space on road and more are the chances of it getting scratched in congested traffic. At the same time a big car is costly, which is reason enough it shouldn’t get scratched …….

I mean Honda unicorn could make you a wing rider but you can’t fly over traffic. Roads in all our metros are jammed with cars and this just brings out the worst in drivers. Even with this much of traffic the congestion could be avoided if people drove with discipline…. you might bump into bigfoot in Sumatra’s jungles but there is (and absolutely) no such thing as a disciplined auto driver in a concrete jungle. Auto drivers don’t mind using pavements (amongst other things like local language (read expletives)) to get to their destination quicker.


And then there is the music of traffic so to say the cacophony that is accompanied with traffic jams. Most times the person with the mightier horn gets his way.. people think the horn is an extension of their voice… but unfortunately horns are not addressed to anyone everyone has to bear with it.

All these maladies are common in all metros around the world but what makes Indian roads uncharacteristically congested, is that the same piece of road is shared by so many entities. There is the unruly auto, the deaf pedestrians, crazy jaywalkers, the local wildlife (read cows, dogs, buffaloes etc), the swinging cyclist, the inebriated bus and lorry drivers and the amateur SBK racers (read students). No where else on earth would you be able to find the oldest and latest in transportation technology sharing the same piece of tarmac, a Pajero and a bullock cart waiting for the green signal at a junction. It happens only in India.

Now that we know what are the various problems plaguing our roads lets find some solutions..

One solution to congested roads has always been public transport but our buses are outdated and overcrowded and to come up with another suitable mode of transport like subways would take years and will change a major portion of the ancient city landscape. Not to mention the cost of such a mega project. Another solution would be to make our cars smaller but that would just mean there would be more cars as they have to cater to the burgeoning city population.

But perhaps the best solution that came to my mind; at least for the short term till some other form of public transport is established; is to have toll booths for private vehicles using city roads. All vehicle owners do pay road tax but the amount is not proportional to our actual road usage. Somebody who owns a taxi pays the same an old man who spends most time indoors just because they own the same car. It’s not fair. And making people (esp Indians ) pay for using city roads will discourage them from private transport. Then probably we can have Indians shining rather than Indians sighing while commuting.