Driving in India

After ten days in Hyderabad, India, I have started to gain a grasp on the culture and lifestyle of this city and country. While understanding the hospitals and care pathway for patients has been eye opening, the most shocking thing for me has been  learning and understanding driving in India.

Before I start on my insights into how people drive in India, I have to give a bit of a background to an incident that happened a few days before we left Baltimore...

Our group had been working on some research before the trip at our (Maddie, Erin, and Shruthi's) house. When we finished working, Dhananjay asked if I would drive him back to his place. For the last two months Jay had been trying to convince me to let him drive my car and for some reason on this day I decided I would let him drive my car the five blocks down the street to his apartment. After settling into the car Jay turned to me and said just tell me the rules. Being the naive American I am, I simply said, "stay on the right side of the road, follow the street signs, and follow the speed limit." Simple enough instructions and ones that I thought would get us from point A to point B without any issues. Unfortunately I was incorrect. Jay was also not privy to staying in one lane when driving, he sped up randomly and wanted to go around cars, and was generally not too aware of the speed limits, street lights, or street signs. Luckily it was a quick two minute drive and when we pulled up to his apartment, I told Jay that this may be the only time I let him do that.

Now fast forward three weeks, and I have quickly learned why Jay drove the way that he did. In India driving is a combination of chaos, skill, and luck. It is an experience that I don't think can be properly explained through words and one that has been extremely difficult to capture in pictures and videos (although I have tried).

An atempt to capture what driving and traffic is like here in India

The first thing you will realize when riding in a car in India is that everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, uses their horn all the time. As I sit in the hotel in the middle of the night, 8 floors up, and a good quarter mile away from the road, I can still hear the horns beeping away. Speaking with people who learned to drive in India we have come to understand that teaching people how to honk is part of leaning how to drive in India; which from my experiences definitely seems to make sense. Fortunately, Jay is not much of a casual honker so when driving in Baltimore, this was not an issue.

This was one of the most congested roads we have seen so far in India.

However the next thing I noticed riding in cars, and something that Jay did do in Baltimore, was disregard lanes. Here a two lane road becomes a four lane road and a 4 lane road somehow leads it's way to 16 rows of staggered cars, bikes, buses, motorcycles, fruit carts, and auto-rickshaws. At any given time a new lane of traffic can appear and people here will drive wherever they can to get by other people.

Another attempt at trying to capture traffic from inside the car

This leads me to the next point of Jay trying to drive around cars. In India, you drive looking out for yourself and hope that people move out of your way. What this means is that while in a car, it is not unusual for cars to speed up quickly and narrow in around you or for motorcycles to swerve in and out of tiny narrow gaps. When you think about 16 rows  of traffic on a 4 lane road there is not much room for anything else. Yet in India, somehow people seem to still get by and within those 16 rows of traffic you find people knocking on the window begging for money or trying to sell things to your car.

Cars closing in around the autorickshaw during our first ride.

Another interesting thing to note is that very few people here wear seatbelts and even less of the people on bikes and motorcycles wear helmets. I have not quite figured out how people are okay with this but, considering most cars have over 6 people in them, motorcylces have anywhere from 1 to 4 people on them, and autorickshaws can have up to 8 people in them, logistically, their really is no way for everyone to wear a seatbelt.

This is a typical auto-rickshaw packed with lots of people

All of the motorcycles without their helmets piled onto the bikes.

Aside from the sheer shock of actual driving, the way people get around is almost as mind boggling. Imagine being dropped in the center of New York, along with a few hundred thousand extra people that don't live there, and there are no street signs or general indicators of where you are. Now add into that the poverty of India, the winded and crisscrossed roads, and the fact that they drive on the left hand side of the road, and that is a bit of a better picture of what I feel like driving in India is. In our entire time here I have seen one green street sign hanging on a bridge over what appeared to be a major road. The sign itself appeared to be a good 30 years old and it was hidden behind a billboard that made it pretty difficult to see from the street. It seems that people here just know where to go. Thankfully we have a driver and some guidance from people who know where they are going because, even if I could have access to google maps (which apparently works pretty well here), I would have no idea what I was doing. Although I did not realize at the time, the fact that Jay was not sure what street we were on or the names of the streets he walked on everyday, makes sense. He has never really needed to know the names so it is just something that he has not paid attention to.

A deceptively calm picture of Dr. Yazdi crossing the street.

Another driving/ traffic related experience in India is crossing the street. In America we take for granted cross-walks and the fact that when we press a button a little light up man will show up to indicate that we can cross the street. In India, this is definitely not the case and in fact, it was not until our fifth day here that I even realized they had crosswalks. To cross the street in India you have to commit. As soon as you get in front of the line of traffic you have to be prepared for cars to keep going, horns to beep, and your life to be in danger. There is no second guessing your decision and definitely no place you can stop in the lane. This is another phenomenon I have tried to capture with pictures, but unfortunately I think a GoPro may be the only thing that could do it any justice.

Another attempt of capturing a video of the honking and busy streets

In a country with so many people and so much congestion, it is no wonder that this is the way driving and traffic is. And although I could probably go on for another three pages about the shock of driving here and how somehow when Jay drove the car here in Hyderabad I felt safe, I should probably stop. However, reflecting on this aspect of Indian culture and society it is difficult to imagine that this world, which seems so complacent with the  way traffic is, would be willing to implement change elsewhere; especially in the healthcare sector. But I guess that is the reason we are here in India and hopefully, understanding this and other aspects of life will help us find a meaningful niche for our project.