'Improved' Roads

I have been observing the changes in the roads along my daily commute during the past couple of years. These changes are instituted by the civic authority under the misguided impression that it improves a fairly painful state of affairs. No change can make a desired-for difference to the choked traffic that’s a perennial sore in Bangalore city. However, a little courtesy and willingness to follow basic traffic rules would make all the difference in the world.

If the drivers were asked to follow lane discipline or pay up say 10k in fines, I am sure people would see reason. After all a large percentage of these very drivers or their employers seem to follow rules with alacrity while living abroad. Apparently white men’s rules are sort of easier to digest while in India, we automatically become annoying and ill-behaved and couldn’t care a fig for rules. Another case for consideration is that of drunken drivers – those special people who believe that drink makes them invincible and why bother about the poor souls that are hit? If you get caught, slip the cop five hundred rupees and you are free to go your way. If instead of patting these imbeciles on the head, the police actually penalize them as well as confiscate their licenses, potential drunks can simply arrange for cabs and leave the other road-traversing populace well alone.

Without taking such basic steps, it seems to me to be an utter time-wasting exercise to widen roads, build flyovers or plug in the nasty curses known as magic boxes. Widened roads make no difference if cars are jammed door to door since everyone wants to get to places fast and no one sticks to the lanes. Thus a two lane road metamorphoses into a 6 lane disaster during peak hours. No one can go anywhere and no one will get anywhere on time. Flyovers seem to be a matter of personal taste. Depending on which short-sighted idiot is the head-honcho, flyovers are either built or left half done. The ones that do get built are mostly a hastily thrown together mix of pillars and slabs and are so uneven that anyone going beyond 10kms an hour had better watch out unless of course you drive a world-war 2 issue tank.

I need a whole new section to discuss those monstrosities of Bangalore roads – the (black) magic boxes. As I understand it, these things which look like boxes with two open faces for vehicles to pass, were first developed to function as drains and are primarily pre-fabricated and touted as instant underpasses. Our wonderful authorities spend taxpayers’ money to fly to various countries to ‘study’ road development technologies and come back with bulging shopping bags and obsolete drain technology. Thus my commute was made inordinately long and even more painful by the introduction of these crappy boxes at major junctions. Consequently where cars once shoved each other but managed to turn, now cars shove each other and not manage to move an inch. These boxes themselves are designed only for small cars and if you have the misfortune to own anything larger than a snuffbox, you need to find alternative routes.

The best example I have to prove my premise that whoever decides how roads should be improved is basically either drunk or stoned is the infamous Cauvery Junction just before the Mekhri circle underpass on the way to the international airport. I have no way of avoiding it except a route that adds an hour to my commute which I simply cannot endure. So every day as I go along merrily, this is what happens at that very special junction -I go due north (the route is straight as an arrow) and lo and behold I am asked to do a yogic asana like u-turn to continue along the same direction. Why should I turn left and then right and then left again and get back to the same road instead of going forward ten feet? Nobody knows – certainly not the drug-infused architect.

After that its pretty much go up(hold your breath folks) and come down (wheeeee!) over three magic boxes before I hit the sanity of the Hebbal flyover and thence to a magic-box free stretch all the way home. Formerly all of it was just a straight stretch of road but how boring was that! So my commute along this apparently signal-free corridor (which has only 8 signals!) has gone up by at least forty-five minutes in peak time and the only consolation I have is that I am told constantly by the media and the asinine politicians that this is an improvement if I only make myself accept it! Jai Ho!