Put brakes on overlooking, overtaking & overcrowding

PUNE: Pune has so many qualities of an ideal city that people from near and far come and settle here. Of late, one aspect that is increasingly discouraging one and all are the nightmarish traffic conditions.
There are many reasons for this sad state of affairs, but the factors can be summarized into three words with the prefix ‘over’ — overlooking of rules, overtaking in a wrong way and overcrowding of the road.





Overlooking of laws

Heaven knows what happens to the perfectly law abiding citizens of Pune when they are out on the road. The traffic lights are so frequently and brazenly ignored that it is risky to be the first or last in the bunch of vehicles, which start to move once the signal turns green. The former are hit by the ones defying the red signal rule and the latter by those violating the amber light.

The parking rules are observed more in the breach, rather than compliance. We find official vehicles and sometimes even those of the police department parked in a “no

parking area”. Among the orderly parked vehicles we often see a huge cardouble parked or its extended length obstructing the traffic. The even-odd rule is thrown overboard, as if to confirm that we are arithmetically challenged and are not the worthy successors of that great mathematician, Lokmanya Tilak.

Wrong overtaking

The great humourist, Pu. La. Deshpande, had written once that every Punite in her or his heart is a cyclist. So whether she or her drives a scooter, motorbike and car or fly an airplane, the maneuvering actions remain the same which she or her had perfected on a bicycle. So many vehicles overtake from the left, leaving one confused whether we are in Pune or in some European or American city.

Not only is the overtaking done from the wrong side, the timing is often wrong. We frequently see one accelerating vehicle being overtaken by another. This is against the tenets of safe driving and is often the cause of collision. Imagine a moped trying to overtake a Volvo bus or a 16-wheel trailer. The driver of the big vehicle cannot locate a small twowheeler in the rearview mirror; neither can he slow down for the latter to pass.

Overcrowding a norm

There is just not enough space for all the vehicles registered every day. Geneva has the largest per capita density of cars in Europe. But Geneva’s population is around 2 lakh. How can Pune, with a population of about 25 lakh, accommodate similar per capita density of the vehicles? The hawkers with their wares do not realize that they occupy much more of the road space than the size of their carts because of the customers surrounding them. Encroached footpaths force the pedestrians to walk on the road. The road may be of any width, but the available carriageway shrinks to 2 or 3-vehicle width.

There is a story that two citizens of Lucknow missed their train because of the legendary courtesy of “Pehle Aap”. If the citizens of our city imbibe a bit of that Lucknowi etiquette while on the road, it will be another feather in the Puneri Pagadi.

The writer is a general surgeon and a retired medical teacher