Quote:
Originally Posted by shankar.balan When I drive along a road and there are some people waiting to cross or even a cow or bull or dog trying to cross, I generally stop and wave them on. The cars and two wheelers and sometimes buses or lorries behind me honk repeatedly and angrily and I dont give two hoots for their impatience.
Generally people or dogs or bulls or cows in India do not use pedestrian crossings so actually it can be quite an interesting game - "will he wont he" type of guessing game!! The thing is in India, it is smarter to preserve one's sense of humour and accept these things as part of daily life here. If one gets all riled up all the time, then one will only drive one's self to an early grave...
This does not however, excuse the behaviour of cyclists and other vehicles too, breaking the red light and doing whatever they feel like... |
Good to see more details from your side Shankar sir.
Pardon me for my lack of knowledge but some part of your response was hard to understand on point you are trying to make, so I'm left to some assumptions here.
You may be walking with your family around the safe areas/gardens in your residential area, its different than walking to bus-stop everyday from home, get a bus, change the bus at another stop, walk to another stop take another to get to your final destination that may be another few mtrs/kms away from the bus stop.
I too walk with my family on regular basis inside the layout I live in, but I cant compare that with what we are talking about here. You rightly indicated that 'No one in India cares about pedestrians'
Coming to your point where you stop for others to cross the roads (I'm not getting in details whether its a cow or dog
, but human lives, definitely got priority), It would be interesting to know where did you learn that from? Quite a few of us do that and I follow that most of the times. I have had lessons in the school about crossing roads only at Zebra crossings and a couple of more such but nothing more than that (our education system needs improvements too), I learnt it by looking at others who are following it strictly, mainly in the US and other countries. That changed a bit of my behavior, for sure. We can be an example in our own country to help others.
Mannubhai was talking about the modern cyclist, I have not seen a modern cyclist jumping the signals, but rather seen traditional cyclist (who is not cycling by choice) also waiting for signal to go green since the so called 'modern cyclist' waiting besides (Sony world signal), and seen many cyclists jumping that same signal a many times, but I'm just trying to look at that single example that can make a positive impact and we want to see more of them.
You said, 'generally people, dog, bulls, cows don't use pedestrian crossing'. I cant talk about animals, but if given enough opportunities, I'm sure humans will start using it.
"Will he or wont he" question comes only after you provide them enough pedestrian crossing, that question doesn't exist as of now in our country.
So, coming back to the original question, 'pedestrians and cyclist not honoring laws'. There is a reason why they don't, we don't have enough infrastructure, awareness and education that can lead to good behavior. But think about motorists (cars and bikes), they have all the power (vehicles), better infrastructure to ride their vehicles and I'm sure they are definitely highly aware and educated compared to a laborer whos forced to use cycle to work and still motorists breaks the laws and more! Difficult for me to justify. This is just my opinion, I wanted to clarify the single thing that pedestrians and cyclists is not the right area of focus (they have different needs at this time, the infrastructure), it has to be us motorists to improve the current state.