Here in the Netherlands, the traffic is considered a hot topic, many kilometers of car after car waiting to pass yet another infrastructural bottleneck on their way to work. Politicians fiercely debate the topic, experts claim to know better and citizens are saying it has all gone to hell in a hand basket.Amidst this mayhem one would almost forget to put our dismay in perspective. I myself have had the opportunity to experience traffic on a whole new level of chaos, for I have spent a few days in the big city that is New Delhi, India!
Right as you step of the plane, you know you are in a different place. And I’m not talking about “the next state” different, no I mean you have now set foot on another planet! Right off the bat, the heat hits you like a freight train! It is like trying to breathe cotton. You work your way through an airport which, judging from the chaos, must be on fire! There are people running and yelling everywhere. But no fire can be seen though, it’s just another day at the New Delhi International Airport.
However, nothing can prepare you for the shock as you first sit down in a New Delhi taxi and speed away to enter the mayhem. First of all, safety laws are quite different from the west. The cars that they drive there are amazing. They don’t have a single safety feature whatsoever and you can sense that if you are going to hit a blade of grass at 4 kilometers per hour, the car will completely collapse with you in it!
We enter traffic and the sight of it all just leaves you in awe. Never have I seen such break-neck maneuvers in such close succession. Cars swaying left and right, passing each other at great speeds. Bikes, mopeds, horses, taxis, lorries, people on foot, there is no order to be discovered in their motion. With every change of direction, every switch of lanes it is apparently mandatory to honk your car horn as long and as loud as possible. At a green light, everyone simultaneously hits their gas pedal and like angry lions let loose from a cage, the bulk of traffic lunges ahead, almost hitting other traffic in crossing directions which decided that the first 5 seconds of a red light is also green. Traffic in New Delhi is like a living entity, a monster that never sleeps and can kill you in a heartbeat any second it wishes.
As we hammered through the city centre on our route to the great bazaar, I notice little kids on the side of the road, sleeping only a few centimeters from traffic rushing by. You have to ask yourself, what is human life worth? At a traffic light, a group of little children notice me sitting in the back of a cab. They only have two thoughts: 1) that guy is a westerner so he must be a billionaire. And 2) I have to do whatever I can to convince him to give me his money! As they literally bang their little fists on my window, I look into their smudged and hungry faces. I have never felt so ashamed in my life. I have gone pretty far and wide across the globe, but I have never seen anything like this. I am literally stunned, frozen into position. And I felt ashamed again when I noticed relief within me as the taxi started moving again. I never looked back, I didn’t dare.
At this point, the madness of New Delhi traffic is starting to sink in. My taxi driver cuts off two mopeds and nearly kills an entire family. I hardly bat an eyelash. Perhaps we in the west are used to more broad boundaries between life and death. A much bigger safety zone if you will. Here, we are taught to wear a seatbelt, otherwise we might hit one of seven different airbags too hard. In India, the safety zone is far smaller. Something isn’t called a near-accident unless cars literally exchanged paint.
So next time you are in traffic, waiting for the matrix signs to update you on exactly how many more minutes you will have to sit in your air-conditioned car, please remember that here in the Netherlands, there is no such thing as traffic problems. At the most, we have traffic inconveniences.
Jeroen Breukels
