Thursday, March 2, 2017

Traffic notes - brakes? Rear view mirrors? Horns!

There are plenty of things that I'll need to "unlearn", and relearn the old ways of doing things when I get back to North America.  I need to look left when I step off the curb into the street (in India, most of the traffic comes from the right - in the left lane - but perhaps a quarter of it is coming from the left).  Yes, I will be able to drink tap water without it being a life threat.  Mosquito bites might be annoying, but aren't generally life threatening with dengue, malaria, etc.  Jean will be able to take a pee out of doors without checking first for cobras (Vikas, our drip doctor, tells me that a majority of cobra bites in India are on the butt).


And, very dramatically, I'll have to unlearn the Indian techniques of crossing though an intersection (even the small minority of them with "stop" signs - which appear to be meaningless):  It didn't take long to learn that for safety and efficiency, you need to keep up a reasonable speed and need a very flexible neck.  Speed allows you to pass through smaller gaps in the cross traffic, to intimidate some of the cross traffic, and to make a sudden turn to go with the traffic when you realize that you won't actually make it through the gap (perhaps staying upright, and if not, decreasing the closing velocity at impact).  The flexible neck is necessary because you'll be getting cross traffic from both directions on both sides of the road.  If you slow, or stop, you need a bigger gap in traffic to give time to accelerate and it may be a long time before you get that gap.  Plus, you'll generate an increasing cacophony of honking behind you and risk getting plowed down from behind.  I'll have to relearn the whole concept of slowing and stopping.

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