Stick to your lane

Bikes get on to pavements, autos in bike space, cars in auto width, while trucks and buses are all over. The net result is a loss of direction of vehicles for good amounts of time. What I mean is that most of the vehicles are at an angle to the direction of travel! Not even the traffic police know the rules properly. Welcome to Bangalore!

Traffic snarls everywhere on the roads, any time of the day. Off peak hours, the number of blood boiling incidents lessen; but nonetheless, they are there. Noise of modified Yamahas and autos, while driving you deaf, also cut your lane at the same frequency. If everyone stuck to their lanes, things would definitely move faster, but no one would believe that, leave aside following it.

This week, I took an auto once and car-pooled with Rags to take a break from the rude traffic. Two days, I rode my bike just to switch focus to loving the vehicle than the traffic. I wouldn't say that it helped.

Even so, be it on car or bike, I still try to leave early, be in my lane, put on indicators while switching lanes, honk only when flashing lights wouldn't work, give right of way to motorless vehicles, allow people who follow rules to get their right of way, slow down or halt when people cut into my lane (at any angle), let people cross roads and, most of all, keep my head cool!

Award-winning stupidity

Bangalore's traffic is managed by a bunch of jokers who have, in their infinite wisdom of course, blundered to create the worst-ever solution to a non-existing problem: a traffic signal on a flyover (Richmond Rd)! Ridiculous, but its true. I forgot to blog this a few months back when this stupidity was commited, but yesterday I went through a serious aftereffect of that. Its no longer a joke that you can laugh at; its pain in your already pinching traffic. Its an insult to the company that built the flyover!

I struggled through a bumper-to-bumper (what seemed like a bumper-on-bumper) traffic on the flyover, for half an hour. The "traffic police" were manhandling the problem that they created in the first place. After I got down the flyover to convince myself of "end of trouble zone", the barricades used as lane dividers (???!!!) soon corrected me by being on the road since it makes bikers' lives easy to switch directions of travel!

One day I'd seen a car taking, kind of a -- hold your breath now-- U-turn on the flyover from KH Rd to Mission Rd!!!!! Till some days back, I used to really laugh at all this having no option then. I think I should just continue laughing since I don't have an option now either... :)