Raji Sankar 05:44 PM, May 21st, 2012

Bangalore is infamous for it's traffic jams. Yet I wonder if anyone has really thought about why traffic jams are caused and tried to set it right. I find most of the times on the roads I drive the traffic jam is caused by one of the following: - A slow car, auto or bus blocking the entire road preventing others from passing. (I have seen this over the KR market bridge and lot of other places) - I have also seen buses that occupy two lanes preventing others from passing, the whole road in front is empty but behind the bus is a traffic jam (I have seen this on Mysore road) - A set of insensibly parked cars, hence reducing the width of the road to effectively nothing. - A road with lots of speed bumps, every 100mtrs I have to slow down to get over a hump (KR market bridge, can't find any reason for that many speed humps in that bridge where no one is supposed to be walking) - Some procession blocking the entire traffic for around 5 mins. But whatever cause, the underlying cause is that traffic is prevented from flowing at a certain rate. But, most of these causes can be prevented by us driving sensibly. How is it justifiable that there is someone driving at 20kmph on a road where U can actually drive at 60kmph or more. I agree rash fast driving is not sensible, but defensive fast driving the only way we can clear larger volumes of traffic on the same roads. While lot of people make a cry and hue about following lanes and following rules etc and give US as an eg for this, no one sees that in US ppl drive on an average @60mph in US while here I cannot even drive at 60kmph at any given time.. and the roads I can is blocked by lots of slow moving vehicles. Why don't we wake up and start driving defensive fast driving.

Vaidya R 10:00 AM, May 22nd, 2012

Although I do not endorse the idea of 'sensible fast-driving' I do see your point. There are enough morons on pulsars to make us see to it that speed limits are a bit low.
But sensible driving is required. It is annoying when you have to change lanes from the right to the left because there's a tractor going at 20 on the right lane. Also, most of the time when cars or two-wheelers slow down on the right side, they are on a call! Buses don't go with logic. Forget, two buses, one bus that stops in the middle of the road instead of the bus stop is common! Bottom-line, we lack civic-sense. You can't expect the cops to monitor *every-thing*. Some sense has to be built-in.