I've loved driving and being on road journeys - long or short, ever since i was 15. During the past 28 yrs, have burnt as much rubber on city roads as i have romanced mountain paths, verdant jungles or awesome beach stretches. Barring one major accident, about 12 years ago, this love has remained untouched and unblemished.
But the experience of the past fortnite has made me look askance at the unquestioned so far. For the first time in my life - i missed a flight due to a snarl that was oblivious to my urgency and made a 10km distance to the airport seem endless. This has happened to countless guys before and honestly, there's nothing cataclysmic about it. Except that merely 2 days later - i was stuck again. This time not on city roads but on the Mumbai - Goa highway. The fact that departing mumbai at 5.30am made little difference, with us eventually covering a princely 120 odd km in 9 hrs - made this journey the most excruciating in my entire driving life. We ended up abandoning our short getaway plan only to return back to mumbai at the same snail's pace by 9 in the night ! There seemed no obstruction, no accident, nothing untoward at all. It was just a pure and simple traffic build up that was far too humongous and huge for the narrow hiway stretch to accomodate or for the hi-way police to manage.
One has been hearing of similar horrors on Delhi and bangalore roads as well. The banality of the massive fund inflows and spends on road infrastructure seems apparent. The improvement in showcase areas and a few fantastic express-ways is in no way enough. The overall multi fold increased traffic volume needs far more prompt, aggressive and definitive action if our regression into the past century has to stop and incidents like the ones above are to be prevented.
As for me and my road romance, sometimes, hibernation is also a state of being and daydreaming about personal choppers can give one the same adrenalin rush!
2 comments:
this is really sad mohit, yes you're right about bangalore, it seems worse every year... and a big deterrent to our plans of coming back to india, as optimistic as the other stuff like booming economy, free markets etc. sounds.... as always enjoyed this piece of writing too..
..believe me even delhi which has some of the most fantastic infrastructure in the country (incl a fabulous metro network, great flyovers and expressways etc) is nightmarish 50% of the time. Its actually a catch 22. as the economy grows faster, more & more people buy personal transport which further chokes up already clogged roads. Unless some truly innocative transport solutions come up or govt starts heavily penalising personal transport through huge taxes - dont see - too much (real) improvement happening in the near future..
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