Drive by Horn – India’s notoriously dangerous road

Drive by Horn
I’m kept awake by the driver’s sleepiness as we head towards Agra from Delhi, India. Darkness is all around as we speed down a fairly empty motorway. But this is no ordinary motorway. Unlit police barriers pop up unannounced causing the driver to sharply brake and swerve like a Formula One driver going through a schecane. Unlit trucks appear only as blacker blocks in a sea of darkness and unlit camels/horses cart provide extra dangers for a drive that’s more akin to a video game than well, a drive.

That just one of many memorable experiences I’ve survived on Indian roads but they do have incredibly grime statistics with over 100,000 deaths and 2,000,000 injuries every year according to this bbc video. This is an article featuring Harman Sidhu Singh, the man in the video who was disabled in a car crash and is now campaign for safer roads in India.

Judging from the article and the video, they’ve got a long way to go before things will get better. Beside education, better infrastructure and law enforce, another obstacle faced by Indians is the sheer diversity of vehicles on the road, which makes it more difficult to control.

I remember reading before that cars only accounted for 5% of the traffic on the roads. The rest being made up of an amazing assortment of vehicles and animals, including big colorful trucks, rickshaws, tempos (a big rat like vehicle), camels, jeeps, elephants, horses, donkeys and cows, which are allowed to do their own thing in the roads.

Like in the article, I’ve also heard about the three ‘Gs’ you need to drive in India from a man who worked at a hotel in Ahmedabad. He said it like this ‘First you need good brakes, second you need a good horn and most importantly you need good luck.’ All said with a laugh but roads in India are not a laugh.

Besides wondering about the spectacule of animals on the road and seeing which rickshaw can carry the most people, roads in India are stressful and it’s usually a relief when the journey is over. Unfortunately, the statistics seem to bear this out too.

Do you have any experiences of Indian roads? What do you think of driving in India?

urban road scene