Traffic of Pune and our responsibilty as citizen

Traffic in Pune and Our responsibility


I come from a small city named Sangli which is big enough with the infrastructure to support the population. Later, I became a part of life at Bombay and Bangalore each for sizable number of years. I am now here in Pune for past 11 months. All these four places were different in various ways but if I try to rate these in terms of traffic I have to say Pune will not be at least in top two.

According to my understanding a traffic in any city is made up of three aspects, the number of vehicles on road, infrastructure (roads, flyovers, overbridges, tunnels), and the attitude of people towards the traffic rules.
Day by day the number of vehicles on road is increasing and we have a very little control over this but what we can do as responsible citizens is to start thinking of various options such as carpooling, use company transport or public transport (which I know is in a bad shape in Pune). Car pooling is a very good option and can reduce 4 vehicles to 1. The most problematic vehicles in Pune I see are the 2wheelers as they are the ones not following any lane discipline, suddenly take any turns the way they want or come out of any small "gali" and join on to a main road. I cannot say that as the responsible citizens stop using those but can definitely say to improve the way we use them.

The second factor is the infrastructure. Pune as most of Indian cities has seen an unplanned growth in software sector and with it, has seen lots and lots of traffic. We have a very little role to play in the infrastructure development as it supposedly government’s responsibility.
What is left with us is the last and most important aspect of traffic management, i.e. following the traffic rules. This is the point I am going to write about in the rest of this article.

I was walking the other day on Sinhagad Road (foolish to walk on such an extremely dangerous road) and suddenly saw a bike rider falling off his bike. I went to him to see if he was alright. He has some bruises but not a major injury and he was claiming that the vehicle in front suddenly stopped at the red signal (which was a stupid thing to do as per his claim) and he was in no mood to stop at signal. This kept me wondering; did I hear it wrong or was I wrong till that point to consider stopping at red signal to be right. You have cars, buses, bikes, autos, all trying to make their way across to their destination without much regard for rules. If you can reach from one stop to the other without getting hurt or killed, you go for it. It is based on dare and extremely accurate calculation as we miss the dashes by few mm’s not feet. Upon realizing this, I started making a list of the rules which are known to most of us but not sure if follow those. Listing here are some of the rules enforced by the government that one can follow to save few anxious moments, small injuries or a step beyond, a LIFE !

1. Follow the traffic lights - Please do not honk on a vehicle which stops at the red light rather try and stop yourselves at the signals when red. This is especially important for the 2wheelers as they form the majority of the chunk of this rule-breakers.

2. Drive on the roads – Wow! Am I so stupid to write this here? Well, before coming to Pune I was of the opinion that footpaths, are made for pedestrain to walk but, once I was walking on one of these and was abused by a bike rider asking me to get off his way (Really????).

3. Drive from left and overtaking from the right - I can understand that many of the Punekar's have been to the United states or behave like US citizens, but this cant be a reason to follow their right hand drive rule while overtaking. We are driving in India guys, come on!

4. Use the helmets when ride a bike - In Maharashtra a must wear helmet rule was introduced when I was a kid going to college. I remember vividly that, I hated the guys who put this rule in black and white. Helmet used to disturb my hairstyle, ruin my look with shades, was heavy on necks and causing all sorts of problems. I used to make fun of the authorities for this rule claiming that in cities we don’t drive at a phenomenal speed then why this rule. One day, I read in a newspaper about an unfortunate incidence where a person from a known neighbourhood lost his life just because of a big blow on his bear head. Had he been wearing a helmet, the chances of his survival would be quite high. This made introspect about my shallow thinking and that day onwards I decided never to drive a two wheeler without a helmet.

5. Respect zebra crossings - Well the rule here is if you see a pedestrian crossing a road on zebra crossing, your vehicle should stop and let him cross. I heard few US returned people saying that in US the people walking on roads are treated with utmost respect then why can't we or even they who claim this?

6. Seatbelts in car - Lee Iacocca, President and CEO of Chrysler mentioned in his autobiography that for safe drive the front seaters must wear the seat belts and he proved it with enough statistical evidences that in case of accidents seatbelts are much more effective in saving lives compared to your high cost airbags. What he envisioned about 30 years back we are unable to digest today, amusing.

An interesting observation I could make with all these rules being broken that, many of the rule-breakers are from the people who are above the average educational levels (I am saying more than 10th std.). If you do not believe me then do some introspection, how many of us (definitely well educated) have broken either one or more rules from the above list once or more times? I would like to modify the quotes of Anatole France, "An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know is right and how can you make that happen". So do we really know what is right and what needs to be done to make it right as the so called educated people?

I have a list of many more such rules and the fuss we made out of these. Still a question makes me think is to why can we not follow the rules ? Is it because of the bad life practise we are following? Is it because we are trying to win a race (a life we have converted into) with time ? Is it because we have lost respect for everyone, compassion with each one, patience in ourselves? Or is it because we just don’t care for our own lives anymore?

Well I know I have raised many questions here and doubts about our behaviour but here are some EXTRA benefits of following the rules; of course apart from the ones already mentioned.

As a first thing already mentioned above, no more bike riding without helmets. As I started thinking about it, really there are a lot of advantages with this. I no more need to worry about the dust, mud, insects entering my ear, nose, mouth or eyes. For girls especially in Pune who use all sorts of clothes to cover their faces from all directions have this simple fixture doing the job for them.

I stop at the red signal no matter what. You must be wondering what is the extra that, I have in it for me. As there will be always people who hate to stop at those signals and if you are in front of them then, you can just enjoy the mental agony they go through because of you and can laugh at them. Who does not like to laugh at others???

I do follow the speed limits in, well, many places. Now this advantage is from an engineer claiming an efficiency of a vehicle. The more you accelerate and decelerate, the lower your performance will be. The more steady speeds you drive at, the higher is the fuel economy. So we can earn some extra.

With all the sarcasm apart, the bottom line is we all know the rules that have been laid by the RTO, the concern is how to follow them. My solution to this is very simple, if we decide on a daily basis to follow one particular rule which others have been seen to break, we will become habituated to follow all of the rules within a months’ time and even can start teaching others from the society to do the same.

Finally with a pinch of patience, a spoonful of regards to others a handful of compassion and a whole lot of care for our own life, we can make a great recipe of descent traffic management.

Trip to Malshej Ghat

Here I am searching for the topic of my first blog ! But what the heck, I can as well start with the recent trip I enjoyed with my company buddies at Malshej Ghat on Nasik Road.

Well as usual a lot of planning, prework, suggestions, arguments, dissatisfactions and delights went into the pre-tour days of the trip. Debates were going on about why cant we go on weekdays, why not to some resort, why is the budget this and not that(I cant really write the number here :) ). Well I will need a seperate blog for each of these topics but in total whole of the plan was well chalked out.

Finally the day came of the trip. We had a 50 seater bus for those who wanted to be together in the group and I bet these are the ones who enjoyed the day to the fullest. Few were coming by their cars.

The journey started as planned +1 hour late. Here is a snap of Santosh raising Indian flag in front of

the bus. Yes you guessed it right, it was our independence day 15-August !!!

So i boarded the bus from the stop near Viman Nagar at about 7:45PM. After entering the bus to my releaf none of my colleagues or their family members were in businees attire which happen to be a rule in the company premises. The journey went on as we picked up people at various stops.

near Nasik phata, we were joined by the car-riders.

The journey continued through the roads towards Nasik. As a ritual it is a must to have an antakshari in the bus when on a long travel with a group of people and hence it was decided to start the same. The only problem was we were extremely hungry "Papi pet gane nahi de raha tha". So we took a halt at a place dhaba kam nothing and alightned the bus. We were carrying the food items with us which we started serving.

A general observation, when there is a group of people with some work to be done ( like idli serving in this case), there are always people ready to take the work on them and there are people like us taking snaps of ourselves. Well everyone has their own meaning of enjoyment afterall ! As you can see the tea wasunbelievable there !

We then continued with our travel and then the GAME of ANTAKSHARI began. Wow were totally unaware that within ourselves there were Kishor Kumar, Madan mohan, Sonu Nigam, Lata Mangeshkar, Asha bhosle and many Telgu singers whom I dont know. Antakshari was in full swing for close to 1hour45 minutes and yes our team won. By the time on the left hand we started observing the cloud cover over the ghat's of Malshej, our destination.

We unpacked the bags and were ready to rock and roll unfortuantely there was no rain on that day so an extra pair of clothes was just an overload. The agenda was jam packed, sightseeing followed by some games then the lunch and the DJ.

Poeple dispersed to their favorite spots as there were variety of things to enjoy like a backwater of a dam, waterfalls, green pleatue, steep hills and deep valleys, the forts of Raja Shivaji and last but the most important greenery (You know what I mean!)

After spending time walking around observing the beauty of the god crated nature, we decided to have a much needed lunch. The taste of food was awsome dnt know the reason may be it was the hunger but dont want to take any credit away from the cook. We played the vally volly for sometime till one of our best players stroke the ball on the roof of the building. This made sure we were on schedule for the big DJ. We heard that DJ was the best DJ inPune and recently won some very illustrious award.

The DJ was carrying out the fun games, dance, music, masti and maja. Energy was flowing like a force * distance.

I happen to be the singer of the day with my song

"Sach Keh Raha Hai Diwana" being appreciated by everyone from our crowd as well as those from outside our group. This was the first time I was singing in a literal open forum. I was on cloud 9 that time on hearing the words of praise.