As vehicles choke our cities and traffic problems become intractable, Tom Vanderbilt slows down to think about what is going on out there on the roads, as we drive, walk, cycle. The result is this fun-filled, illuminating tome, Traffic.
“Opening his eyes, he would know the place by the rhythm of movements in the street long before he caught any characteristic detail.”
— Robert Musil, The Man
Without Qualities
What other city in the world is like Delhi?” demanded Qamar Ahmed, the city’s joint commissioner of traffic, as we sat drinking chai in his office. Clad in a khakhi uniform topped with bright epaulettes on each shoulder, Ahmed brusquely shifted his attention between me and any one of the three mobile phones on his desk that kept ringing. An air conditioner laboured against the enveloping premonsoon heat. “Delhi has forty-eight modes of transport, each struggling to occupy the same space on the carriageway. What other city is like this?”
To exit the Indira Gandhi International Airport, typically at night, when the international flights arrive, and alight into one of the city’s ubiquitous black-and-yellow Ambassador cabs is to enter a motorised maelstrom. As an anti-congestion measure, trucks are allowed into Delhi only between 10 pm and 6 am, and so the sparsely lit road is thronged with lorries. They lurch, belch smoke, and ceaselessly toot their pressure horns.
This seems by invitation: the back of most trucks bears the brightly festooned legend “Horn Please”, often accompanied by a request to “Use Dipper at Night” (this means “dim your lights”). “Horn Please” originally invited following drivers to honk if they wanted to pass the slower-moving, lane-hogging trucks on the narrower roads of the past and I was told that it endures merely as a decorative tradition. Nevertheless, a cacophony of claxons filled the air.
By day, the mayhem is revealed as true chaos. Delhi’s streets play host to a bewildering stream of weaving green-and-yellow auto-rickshaws, speeding cabs, weaving bicyclists, slow-moving oxen-drawn carts, multi-passengered motorcycles conveying helmetless children and sari-clad women who struggle to keep their clothing from getting tangled in the chain, and heaving buses which are often forced out of the bus-only lane because it is filled with cyclists and pedestrians, who are themselves in the lane because there tends to be no sidewalk, or “footpath” as they say in Delhi.
If there is a footpath, it is often occupied by people sleeping, eating, selling, buying, or simply sitting watching the traffic go by. Limbless beggars and young hawkers converge at the intersection, scratching at the windows as drivers study the countdown signals that tell them when the traffic lights will change. Endearingly, if hopelessly, the signals have been embellished with a single word: RELAX.
In the roundabouts of New Delhi, the raffic whizzes and weaves defiantly past faded safety signs bearing blunt messages like OBEY TRAFFIC RULES, AVOID BLOOD POOL and DON’T DREAM OTHERWISE YOU’LL SCREAM. These signs are as morbidly whimsical as they are common, leading one to suspect that somewhere, lurking in Delhi’s Public Works Department is a desk-bound bureaucrat with the soul of a poet.
The most striking feature of Delhi traffic is the occasional presence of a cow or two, often languidly in the median strip, feet away from the traffic. The medians, it is said, provide a resting place that is not only dry but kept free from pesky flies by the buffeting winds of passing cars. I posed the question of cows to Maxwell Pereira, Delhi’s former top traffic cop who has of late been playing the Colonel Pinto character on Indian Sesame Street.
“Let me correct a little misperception,” he told me as we sat in his office in the Gurgaon district. “The presence of a cow in a congested urban area is no hazard. Much as I don’t like the presence of a cow on the road when I am advocating smoother traffic and convenience, the presence of a cow also forces a person to slow down. The overall impact is to reduce the tendency to overspeed and to rashly and negligently drive.”
Cows, in effect, act as the “mental speed bumps” that Australian traffic activist David Engwicht described. They provide “intrigue and uncertainty”, as Engwicht put it, and the average Delhi driver would certainly rather be late for work than hit a cow.
I heard that particularly Indian phrase — “rash and negligent driving” — often while in Delhi, but after a few days I started to lose sight of how that could differ from the norm. Delhi drivers have a chronic tendency to stray between lanes, most alarmingly those flowing in the opposite direction.
The only signal used with regularity is the horn. Instead of working brake lights (or indeed any brake lights), many trucks have the phrase KEEP DISTANCE painted on the back, a subtle reminder to the driver behind: I may stop at any moment. Some taxis, on the other hand, bear the inscription KEEP DISTANCE, POWER BRAKE. This means: I may come to a stop faster than you expect.
Many vehicles lack side-view mirrors, or keep them folded in. Autorickshaw wallahs actually mount their sideview mirrors on the inside, presumably to keep them from getting clipped off — or from clipping others. When changing lanes, drivers seem to rely not on the mirrors but rather that the person behind them will honk if there is danger. (It is not uncommon, meanwhile, to see scores of bus passengers leaning out the windows and advising the driver about whether he can merge, or trying to guide traffic themselves.)
As a result of this collective early warning system, the sound of horns on a road like Janpath in New Delhi is as constant as birdcalls. When I asked one taxi driver, who went by the moniker J P, how he coped with Delhi traffic, his answer was quick: “Good brakes, good horn, good luck.”
After spending some time in the city, one vacillates between thinking Delhi drivers (and pedestrians) are either the best or worst in the world — the best because they are so adept at manoeuvring in tight spaces and tricky situations, or the worst because they put themselves there to begin with. “That is why we have a negative connotation to the phrase ‘defensive driving’ in India,” said Pereira, who still speaks in the flowery but formal vernacular of Indian officialdom.
“Defensive driving is defending yourself from all the vagaries, including the negligence contribution on the part of the road user.” Pereira advised me not to try Delhi traffic firsthand: “The Indian driver relies more on his reflexes, absolutely. Your reflexes would not be geared to expect the unexpected.”
Conversely, when Pereira finds himself in the United States visiting relatives, his passengers, who may fail to appreciate the lingering aftereffects of Delhi traffic, are often perturbed by his driving style.
“When I see a vehicle approaching from a side road, I tense up. Internally, I’m used to a condition in India where I’m not sure if when they are coming from the side road they will step into my path,” he said, adding that in the States, “you expect that he will never: here I will not expect that he will never. The halt-and-proceed thing is not there.”
Arguably, drivers anywhere should always try to expect the unexpected, but this is taken to a kind of high art in Delhi, where the unexpected perversely becomes the expected. There are nearly 110 million traffic violations per day in Delhi I was told by Rohit Baluja as we sat in his office in the Okhla Industrial Area, eating lunch in the small metal pails known as tiffins.
The dapper and successful owner of a shoe company, Baluja founded the Institute of Road Traffic Education in an effort to improve the condition of Indian roads on which an estimated 100,000 people die every year — one out of every ten road deaths in the world. He launched IRTE after a succession of business trips to Germany, where he was astounded by the well-defined and relatively orderly traffic system.
“As soon as I returned to Delhi it felt as if everybody here is stealing your right-of-way, and that nobody understands there is something called a right-of-way,” he said.
In 2002, a group of English police studying Delhi traffic told Baluja that whereas in the United Kingdom one can predict with 90 per cent certainty the behaviour of the average road user, in Delhi they felt that no more than 10 per cent compliance could be anticipated. They called it anarchy on the roads. “We have started living in indiscipline, so we don’t feel there is an indiscipline,” Baluja told me.
(Extracted from TRAFFIC by Tom Vanderbilt, published by Allen Lane. Copyright © Tom Vanderbilt, 2008)
TRAFFIC
(WHY WE DRIVE THE WAY WE DO AND WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT US)
Author: Tom Vanderbilt
Publisher: Allen Lane
Price: £12.99
Pages: 375
