Bangalore Stuff

This is the road to hell

2010-09-12T11:22:00.000-07:00

............

She said son, what are you doing here? I said, mama, I have come to the valley of the rich, myself to sell.
She said son, this is the road to hell!

Well, I am standing by the river. The water doesn't flow. .........

These are excerpts from Chris Rea's Road to hell album from the title song. That is what Bangalore (or Bengaluru - the new name) is all about!

Enjoy reading/viewing the blog.

Srinath

Pictures say better than words! Enjoy!

2010-09-11T00:56:00.000-07:00

See that! He is sleeping and is precariously balanced on a moving vehicle!

Left side of the road is for vehicles going in one direction. The right side for .............. from opposite direction!

Just read the print on the cartons!


Do we need to say anything?


How to create a traffic jam.

You see this pictures? What do they tell you and me! Whatever number of traffic cops you deploy, unless we, road users are sensible, no one can ever stop these traffic jams! Everyone is in a hurry and end of the day no one gets to their destination on time, all because, we, the citizens don't follow some basic rules! We blame the government, the system, people - it is always them, never us!

Regards

Srinath

All about a parking ticket

2010-08-20T19:11:00.000-07:00

Couple of weeks ago, I got a parking ticket landing at my home saying I parked in a no parking zone and I have to pay up. I was quite surprised!

The place where I was supposed to have parked my car, there was no way I could have done that! The only way, I could have parked my car is waiting for the traffic jam to clear. With metro rail work going on in full swing, many of our roads are reduced to 25% of their original width. It is a choc-a-block wherever metro work is being carried out. There are 100s of vehicles just standing there, some patiently and most of them impatiently. I was stuck in one of those jams and I get a parking ticket for having parked in a no parking zone. May be all the 150-200 cars, bikes, vans, buses and trucks would have got the parking ticket that day!

The notice also said, there is a image proof. I could have gone and checked it out. To do that, it would cost me more than the fine and not less than few hours. I just paid up.

Things that happen in Bangalore!

Traffic Conditions in Bangalore

2010-07-20T19:21:00.000-07:00

Nowadays, we don't calculate the time to reach from point A to point B in minutes, it is mostly hours.
It is all thanks to the roadworks, the railworks (Metro rail), Autos, Taxis are the ones who are causing this.

The roadworks in Bangalore! It is so nice of the powers that be that they get great ideas and the results are just too good. One day, a road is neatly asphalted, we are all happy commuters! Couple of weeks down the line, the other civic authority digs up roads and start laying new drainage pipes. What is left of the road is not even half of what was available before. You never know when they will fix the road again.

Oh, yes. We have seen lot of hollywood movies and bollywood movies where you have these trigger happy cops and thugs who are drawing their guns at every opportune moment. We have honk happy drivers who just keep honking for no real reason. It is like one hand is glued to the horn button.

Now, just think of this scene for a moment. You are patiently waiting for the signal to turn green at the traffic signal. The signboard says, no free left turn which means you can't take that turn unless the signal turns green. Then, there are these taxis, autos, buses who are honking with all their might and literally pushing you to break the law by forcing you to turn and if you don't, then, be ready for all the #$%^%&@#^* that they swear at you and your entire family tree.

Oh, when the signal is just turning amber, it is like watching a start of F1 race, in this case, engines roaring and additional music thanks to the horns. In fact, some of the taxis, cabs have these noisy honks that go on and on at the press of the button. These are illegal, but who cares!

I stay in west side of the city and have to travel to the east for work. All the entry points from west to east, we have metro rail work going on now or someone is laying power cables. The traffic is choatic. Everyone is in a hurry, everyone fights for space, everyone wants to get ahead of the other - end result is a bottle neck and a deadlock. And then there are really some great people out there, from extreme left they would want to go to right, from extreme right, they would want to go to left and the guy who wants to go straight does not know where to go hahaha!

Now, this is not just the autos (the 3 wheeler cabs) or Taxis, I am talking about Audis, Mercs, BMWs, Hondas, Toyotas, GMs, Fords, Suzuki, Hyundai........ There is nothing wrong with any of these! What is wrong is the mindset of the people who are driving those!

People used to be calm and cool in this place. Now, we have people fighting with cops, going to the extent of even trying to beat them up! Oh yes, recent times, there have been instances of drunk women attacking police who were just doing their job. Some guys have gone to extremes of running over the cops who have tried stopping them. The cops have had to run for their lives but not all of them have got lucky. There have been a few unfortunate ones who paid with their lives. These incidents have brought in some measures and they seem to be working.

I have seen the very same people follow all the traffic rules, signs when they are driving abroad and back home, they are back to the same old devices.

I used to enjoy riding my motorbike and taking my car out for drives. I have really started hating the thought of driving nowadays. Hopefully, all the pain that we are going through will go away soon thanks to Metro rail. At least that is what I think.

We have few good jokes for you.

1. People in the USA drive on the right side of the road, people in UK drive on the left side of the road. We, drive on what is left of the road!
2. The movie "One Flew over a cuckoo's nest" made Jack Nicholson famous, The roads in Bangalore have made the song from the movie even more famous "One went left, one went right, one went over the payment and another went down the open drain".
now:

Oh, before I sign off, I almost forgot to tell you how cops are using technologies to catch offenders now!
Our cops today have Blackberry's, Speed radars, speed cameras, cameras at major signals..... So, dear Bangalorean, if you think you got away by bending the law, and you thought no cop saw you, beware, you are going to be in for good surprise! You will get a nice warm letter coming home from the law authorities. Well, you can even go see all of it here: http://www.bangaloretrafficpolice.gov.in/

Thanks for reading all my ravings and rantings.

sort of off subject! US Railroad Tracks.

2010-07-19T08:31:00.000-07:00

Very interesting. Read on......

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Who in the hell came up with this kind of a specification? Mind boggling!

Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed the US railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.

Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this?' , you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.)

Now, the twist to the story:

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah

The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything... andCURRENT Horses Asses in ............ control the world!

Choatic Traffic at Magadi Road, Bangalore

2010-06-08T04:17:00.000-07:00

Well, this one is about the stretch on Magadi road where Metro work is in full swing. The road is quite wide now and there are few bottlenecks where the metro work is in progress. Many a time the traffic comes to a grinding halt not because of metro work, but for totally a different reason.

The reason is everyone wants to be the first to get ahead! In the process they completely block the road leaving no room for the oncoming traffic to move. Yes, there are no dividers on the road unfortunately. If it had been so, they would have been forced to stay on their side of the road and not takeover the other side of the road too!

Here is a picture taken one of the evenings few days ago.

Here is a nice picture of a truck at Bangalore City Railway Station

2010-06-08T04:06:00.000-07:00

Here is my first post on Bangalore traffic stuff.

Here is a picture taken at the Bangalore city railway station sometime in May 2010 early in the morning. The picture was taken from a mobile camera with just 2MP and as it was early morning and I was walking towards the station, the quality is not so good. Nevertheless, the picture is of a truck that was parked in a slot reserved for disabled.

Here it is:

Is there no parking facility at Bangalore Railway Station?

No problem at all. There is ample parking space and still this driver had taken the liberty of parking it in a place where he should not have.