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by varshithr 2332 days ago
There's no concept of lanes in India. Vehicle volume and variety are so huge that it kind of makes sense to have all the vehicles move tightly packed.

Comparatively, it's pretty chaotic here.

1 comments

And a lot more people die per mile.
It’s a trade off. You can’t neatly organize ox, a guy pulling a heavily loaded cart, an ox driven cart, a bicycle, a scooter, a motorcycle, a rickshaw, a car, and a heavily loaded truck which is probably overcapacity.
You can certainly neatly organize those. First of all, ox and horsecarts don't even really need tarmac, and so in many countries where these means of transportation persist, they are only allowed to use the earth surface parallel to the road. Scooters should be expected to do the same, as even the cheap Chinese motorbikes found throughout the developing world have tires thick enough for earth or even sand.
If you’ve been to India, you will see that there is no earth surface parallel to the road in many places. It’s a path that is two lanes wide, maybe a little longer, and everything is negotiable. It may be possible to reign it in with China style authoritarian rule, but Indian culture is not like that in my experience. Although perhaps it would result in a safer environment.
A lot of those fatalities are from minor mishaps on mopeds combined with hard surfaces and a lack of helmets.