Survival of the quickest

I don't drive.

That's a very odd statement for an automotive journalist to make, I know. It's like OJ Simpson saying "Okay, I'll 'fess up" or Hugh Hefner saying "I'm too old for this." Let me clarify things, then: I don't own a car myself and as such, don't drive one too often. I don't live in the city either, so driving there is pretty much a novel experience for me. I got a taste of that novelty recently.

If you've ever been to Mumbai, you'll know what I'm talking about when I say that to call the road infrastructure slightly incapable of handling the number of vehicles the city has is a bit of an understatement. I have known this all my life, but have been safely screened from it thanks to its public transport systems. I got a hands-on experience this time with the petrol Indica I borrowed from a friend – a perfectly ordinary car except for a missing left wing mirror and a cassette deck in this day of iPod connectivity. I was on an airport run, and expecting a lot of luggage to be carried back by the person I was going to receive – which is why I took the car. Besides, I didn’t want to haggle with a cabbie who was out to make a quick buck after a tiring day.

Driving around late at night wasn’t much of a problem, but if I hadn’t known the roads, I’m sure I would’ve got lost – and just to check, I did follow the signs, and they made me go away from the airport for quite an appreciable distance – I must’ve lost about a half hour following the signs. No complaints about the Western Express Highway, though, it took me to the airport turnoff in no time. However, the week before even the ‘Express Highway’ was clogged at rush hour. The morning following the airport run saw me drive around quite a bit in the city – and again, I had no clue where I was going, because whatever signboards were there assumed you knew where you were, and every single point along your route. I’m not saying that there should be a hundred names on a single signboard simply because it happens to be on an arterial road, but it’d certainly be nice if geographic directions were posted. There have been too many times that I have taken a left only to find that it isn’t a left, after all, it snakes around a couple of buildings and continues in the original direction of my travel! Why can’t the government simply post “South” or “North” on turnoffs? I know it’d be useless to the general public – trains that go to Delhi are “down” trains, and those going to Chennai are “up” trains. Am I the only one who thinks that that is a very wrong way of designating them? Yes, I know, most of us are clueless about geographic directions, but given enough time we’ll learn, and it’ll help us if we’re in a place we’ve never been before – we’ll know roughly which direction to go in, should we get lost. Never mind the directions, though, I was too occupied with bikers zooming past on my left without warning, and people honking and cutting across me, and… you get the drift. Why are we so barbaric on the road? Why can’t we stay in our lane or patiently follow a car until it gives way? Why can’t the car in front give way as soon as possible?

We may blame driving schools who issue driving licences without a single class, if the price is right. We may blame the government employees who accept the bribes from the driving schools with no compunction whatsoever. I put forward an oft-repeated, but neglected argument: we don’t have the roads – or the time – to follow traffic rules. If you don’t believe me, visit a place with wide roads and little traffic. There is room to manoeuvre, even for those who are in a tearing hurry – and those who hold up traffic in the fast lane can move over as soon as possible when asked to move over by a faster car. Can one do that on a two-lane road where the lane on the left is full of parked cars and pedestrians that spill over from the pavement? As for the ‘time’ bit of my argument, well, if you’ve got the time, excuse the irony, do have a look at Mumbai on google earth or wikimapia. The roads look like a three-year old was let loose with a crayon on a map of Mumbai, and the planning commission thought it a good idea to follow the child’s work of art. The city hasn’t grown so much as exploded; even today, new residential areas and office blocks pop up as frequently as pimples on a teenager’s cheeks. What compounds the problem is the standard of living – people in the city are gaining the capacity to purchase things (is it any wonder that there are takers for any apartment complexes that are built?) and among those things they purchase are vehicles.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating the use of the public transport system over private vehicles. If you’ve got the money to pay for the fuel and the car, why not? No one ever stops us from buying humongous plasma-screen televisions and ten-speaker sound systems that run on electricity, which, when you come down to it, run on electricity generated at a coal-powered station – so why target cars? Back to the topic at hand, though, and we’re seeing an increasing number of cars on the road simply because people can buy them – but there isn’t an effective way (yet) to keep widening roads, or reducing travel time in the city. In my morning of driving around, I tried to behave like the civilised person that I like to believe I am, and obeyed all the traffic rules. Result, I was a moving obstacle, and other vehicles simply muscled their way past, and I got delayed more and more. I could have either stayed the gentleman driver and stuck by the rules I’ve been taught, or I could have lowered myself to everyone else’s level and slugged it out with their rules.

To take a leaf out of the theory of evolution as proposed by Charles Darwin, you either adapt or go extinct. I chose to evolve.