Mumbai needs more traffic jams

Recently I had a great idea for eliminating all road accidents in Mumbai. The idea came to me while I was on page 1,027 of Tolstoy’s War And Peace. I had begun reading it many, many years ago, during my first year in college.

But three years later, when I got my degree, I had only reached page 17. After that, I couldn’t find the time to read it until I began to spend the bulk of my life inside a metal box crammed between other metal boxes — a popular pastime in Mumbai that is more widely known as traffic jamming. 

There was a time when I hated traffic jams, like some people still do. But over the years, I have learnt that, like every single one of God’s creations, traffic jams too have a purpose.

I made this discovery one morning in July this year. I was stuck in this stretch leading up to the dreaded Wadala bridge where trucks and cement mixers of every size, shape and sexual orientation would queue up.

It had been pouring for hours, like someone was overturning bucket after bucket up in the sky where they store the monsoon rain. The traffic was moving about as fast as the hour hand on a clock — you didn’t know it moved until you checked every hour or so.

Many of the vehicles just curled up on the road and went to sleep. After three hours, and probably a litre or two of fuel consumed in idling and turning the engine on-off, I must have crawled across a stretch no longer than your average pothole and definitely shorter than Amar Singh.

This is the kind of situation when immature drivers lose it. They honk incessantly, chew their nails, or, like I did that July morning, squat on the road next to the car and sob uncontrollably.

The reason we hate jams is because time moves very slowly when you’re stuck in one. The solution, therefore, is to make time move fast. The easiest way to make time move fast is to do what you like to do.

Since what I most like to do cannot be done without a willing partner from the opposite sex, I could only indulge in my second most favourite activity: read.

So I always keep the car well stocked with dozens of books I haven’t read.  In fact, I finished all three volumes of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy entirely in the car — with the bulk of it read at Hindmata and Elphinston bridge.

The upside of this strategy is that when you’re reading a thriller like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, you actually want the traffic jam to last longer, so you can keep reading, for when the traffic starts moving, it means you have to shut the book, sometimes in the middle of a sentence such as, “She took two swift steps and threw open the door and aimed her gun at —” When you reach the stage where you don’t care whether the traffic moves or not, you know you’ve won.

You’re not upset by jams anymore. On the contrary, you get annoyed when the vehicle in front moves ahead by three centimetres without any warning, and the chap behind starts honking like a maniac.

So, as I was saying, last month I picked up War And Peace, which I hadn’t been able to finish since college, and when I was on page 1,027, at the Elphinstone red light, I had this epiphany: road accidents happen because people drive at a speed high enough to kill someone. What if we subsidised cars so that even the poorest of Mumbai’s 18 million can afford one?

Even beggars and street urchins would commute to their designated traffic signal in a car. With 18 million cars on the road, the entire city would be permanently jammed, and happily, nobody would ever be able to drive at more than 1.5km per hour, thereby putting an end to accidents, hit-and-runs, and drunken driving too — for you may drink, but you may not drive if there is a jam at all times of day and night.

The Chinese, who we are constantly trying to catch up with, are already implementing this policy.

Just a couple of months ago, the Anglo-American press was reporting goggle-eyed about a 100km long jam in China that lasted 13 days. But in Mumbai, especially in Parel, with 36,000 parking slots being created, I think we can beat the Chinese hands down. We can easily have month-long jams where all you do is read and booze and have fun in a never-ending commute that is no longer a commute but a carnival where the roads, packed with unending queues of cars, buses and trucks stretching from one end of the city to the other, will once again open itself up to pedestrians. Drivers will abandon their cars — as they did in the 13-day jam in China — and dance on the streets. And nobody will ever have to die in a road accident.

But before all this can happen, the government should do all it can to cut down on public transport so that every single inhabitant of the city is forced to buy personal transportation.

Though I know it’s already on the right track, BMC should work harder to dig up nice roads, start fly-over projects where none are required, and stop all maintenance work so that roads are full of beautiful potholes.

This way, it can save money on building speed-breakers and at the same time slow down traffic to a crawl even when there aren’t enough vehicles on the road to jam things up. And then we can look forward to an accident-free, joyous, road-rage-proof traffic.