Driving in India: Taking it to the Streets with the Mahatma

Don’t just take our word for it. Driving in India is tough and they know it. DLA research staff was impressed by the number of sites and blogs dedicated to confronting national plague of mayhem, danger, and discourtesy. And although I have been firm in reminding them that mayhem, danger, and discourtesy can be found on any corner here in Boston, the DLA staff was equally adamant in maintaining that India’s story was one that had to be told. I relented and agreed to one more posting on driving in India, something of a bibliography of DLA’s web research.

 
Street Signs in India:  Yeah, this will be on the test!

Many of these sites seem to be a result of the gandhigiri wave which struck India following the 2006 musical comedy, “Lage Raho Munna Bhai,” in which an underworld bigwig sees the light after beginning a series of conversation with a picture of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhigiri, essentially the practice of Gandhi’s tenets of truth and “truth force”, is something of a phenomenon in India. Disdained as “flower power” by some, practitioners hand out roses, apply its non-violent approach to social issue protest, launch volunteer work, and, yes, even work to bring gandhigiri to the nation’s driving problems. Thankfully, the DLA staff is made up mostly of MIT grads or near-grads so it isn’t likely that they will be swayed by the idea of handing out roses at the Andrew Square off-ramp. But you never know.

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Licensing + Bureaucracy = Long Lines + Bribery…Massachusetts got 3 out of 4

"You never want to share the road with someone who truly believes in reincarnation"

Anyone within earshot of CNN earlier this month could not have missed the announcement at the New Delhi Auto Expo of Tata Motor’s “Nano”, a one-lakh ($2,500), thirty HP, two-cylinder, one-wiper blade car. Most of the world-wide buzz centered on either the market significance of the new car’s price point or around the spectre of its environmental impact once 30 or 40 million of these things hit the streets. 

Driving in India? You'll need one of these and, well, some big ones. 

But here at DLA, researchers knew that 30 or 40 million new cars would easily equate to 300 to 400 million new drivers. Where and how would they would learn to drive could provide DLA research staff with an in situ opportunity to glean behavioral insights from another country in our effort to understand Boston’s ass-like driving.

Unfortunately, as often seems to be the case, DLA’s trademark—the thoughtful, deliberate response to driving behavior—was, while certainly thoughtful, a bit too deliberate and we were trumped by Somini Sengupta's piece in the January 11 The New York Times, “Indians Hit the Road Amid Elephants.”

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This country's greatest traffic minds have given us more than 1,200 pages of traffic control devices.  They had no clue of what they up against in Massachusetts!

THE CHALLENGE  I’m only guessing, but my money says that most major rotaries in Massachusetts are festooned with no fewer than 233 signs appended to poles, lamps, guardrails, buildings, trees, sticks, and—often--people. There is a small number of route numbers and street name signs, but they are inconsistent, at best, so as to leave room for the visual clutter of parking restrictions and street cleaning notices, singles meetings and Kiwanis meetings, future and historical sites, and the like. Regular commuters, of course, can ignore every one of them, as they do other visual obstructions such as traffic lights and yield signs. But those unfamiliar with the area will soon realize that even if they COULD get there from here, there is no way they will be able to figure that out in the 47 seconds it takes them to move half way around the intersection, during which time they will have seen more 100 signs. Averaging about .47 seconds per sign, the pathetically dumbfounded motorists choose the roadway of least resistance which gives them odds in the neighborhood of 145:1 of making the right choice—which they don’t. So, they drive for the next three blocks at about 7 mph before making a U-turn and, remarkably, head back to give it one more try… all the while driving like ass.

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