| This is MAD
I'm just finishing the first week of a two week business trip in Bangalore. It's one of those places in the world where a Ducati would be completely pointless because the traffic is completely MAD.
It has to be seen to be believed. The team I'm working with have a 4 x 4 Toyota cab, with a driver, assigned to us for the two weeks and every day we pitch ourselves into the rush hour traffic between the hotel and the office.
The cars, trucks and buses have no lane discipline at all, and where the road is wide enough to fit two vehicles, you'll find three of them all going for the gap and blaring the horn. There are endless obstacles on the road, loads of those three wheeler auto rickshaws that have a 150cc vespa two stroke engine to pull three or four people, they trundle along weaving about all over the place and belching smoke and two stroke fumes (I'm told that some people manage to run them on parrafin). The pavements are in such poor repair that pedestrians use the road as well and the rickshaws and all the other traffic has to constantly weave about to avoid little groups of pedestrians, wandering cows and dogs. The thing that amazes me is that when you've got a street with three or four lanes of traffic zigzaging along in one direction and the same going the other way, there is no attempt to give way if the obstruction is on your side of the road, the drivers just pull straight out into the oncoming traffic and your journey to work involves a series of near head-ons, because of course the people coming the other way are doing exactly the same thing.
Now all this is pretty chaotic, but then every available gap between the cars and trucks is completely filled with hundreds of motorbikes and scooters that just charge for every available gap. Every time the traffic lights change it's like the start of a motocross race as they all hurtle towards the next gap, scraping handlebars and crashbars together with people riding sidesaddle pillion. One guy was transporting a pair of massive gas bottles that were just tied with a piece of rope thrown over the saddle and strapped to the bike like a pair of throwovers, the gas bottles were so big that it made the bike about 4 feet wide and they were only about two inches off the road, every time this guy went around a corner they'd drag on the ground showering sparks everywhere....you'd like to think they were empty gas bottles.
All the bikes are little japanese bikes, or Indian and Chinese copies of the same. 150 cc's passes as a superbike it seems and the technology is all air cooled and drum brakes - you see the occasional hot shot riding exotica like a 350 Royal Enfield.
It's worse at night. About 25% of vehicles have no lights at all and the rush hour never stops, it's like this well into the early hours.
Madness, pure madness...Never mind Oulton Park, the DD boys ought to get out here to practise how to sneak through on the inside when there is no perceivable gap.  |