Doug’s World

Indian Driving

One of the things I love about India is the way the traffic flows.

Here in the US, our approach to traffic is very rigid and simplistic: it’s all about rules and standardization and predictability, with a hierarchical “command and control” mentality in place. The traffic lights tell you what to do, and you do it, and people carefully stay within the lines of their lanes. Any variation from the predefined procedures is considered an act of aggression or stupidity, and often elicits an angry reaction from drivers nearby. (I’m quite familiar with that reaction!)

But in India, people just drive. Or walk, or ride a rikshaw, or whatever. The focus isn’t on rules and regulations, it’s on getting to your destination. And this goal-oriented approach works great: in spite of the wide variety of vehicles involved (and variety of species too, but I won’t offend my Indian friends by mentioning any of them ), Indian traffic flows very efficiently. It’s like a self-correcting network protocol that automatically re-routes around congestion and keeps the data flowing in conditions that would shut more rigid systems down.

If you haven’t been there, here’s a video clip that shows what you’re missing: two minutes of typical Indian traffic. It’s obviously unedited and truly quite typical. I’ve taken dozens of photos to try to capture the feel of traffic over there, but a video conveys the feel of it better than a photo ever could.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 at 6:08 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.