Category Archives: User Behavior

Traffic Shock

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Coming back to India after a longish interval of time has its reverse cultural shocks to account for. The maximum impact is made by the unruly traffic. No matter how long you have lived in India and how little time you have spent outside India, it always hits you smack in the face (I hope not literally) the moment you touch down. To top that effect, I have one heck of a driver in my dad. He spells rash driving with a capital R and not once has he ever admitted to doing so. He has the unique ability to go from Mumbai airport to Panvel, a distance of approximately 40 miles in almost 20 minutes; the hour being pre-dawn seems to encourage him a little more to step on the gas. Believe it or not, it was my first ride when I landed in India and I was pale with fright by the time we reached home.

But I have always considered him to be an exception when it comes to driving. Other drivers crawl at a snail’s pace, I consoled myself so. But I couldn’t brace myself enough for the shock that was to be a regular feature during my stay in India. I may sound like a unaware foreigner from bucolic environs who has never experience traffic before. But an extended period of disciplined (generally speaking) driving and strict adherence to the law, even if it was in the fear of the car with the flashing lights standing nearby probably has habituated me to the life of pleasant driving. In Mumbai, it is virtually the battle of the impatient souls who never seem to have an idea where exactly they are headed in such a hurry. Traffic rules, much less the white painted lanes are considered mere suggestions not strictly enforced rules of traffic. The recently-installed countdown counters on the Navi Mumbai intersections seem to have an opposite effect. I have never seen the traffic wait until the clock counted all the way down to zero before turning green. The impatient vehicles, revving up with hungry anticipation teeter on the brink of impatience ready to shoot off as soon as one of them decides to jump the signal. The rickshaws are the worst. I had the unfortunate misfortune of sitting in one who would dash out like a Triple Crown equine before the criss-crossing traffic had an opportunity to stop; zigzagging his way through the maze of blaring horns he would have this triumphant grin plastered over his face as I held on to dear life. Somehow I was missing out on the machismo of the incident. They are not wrong when they say that you gotta learn driving in Mumbai if you have to drive in Mumbai; well they say that for Pune too, and Delhi; each with a different flavor of urban wildness.

Anecdotal evidence aside, accounts of any visitor to a bustling Indian metropolis always has countless stories about our traffic and of course, the proverbial cow or the elephant on the street. Actually, I did see couple of elephants in separate incidents within a span of one month. The accounts are so prevalent among the tourists that you feel they would be disappointed if they saw any less. And we are only too eager to please. We have enamored ourselves to the romantic notion of unruly traffic and crowded trains. You haven’t lived in Mumbai if you haven’t honked your way through Linking Road or hanged outside the packed train at peak hour – are common statements among Mumbaikars; especially if you are talking to a drunk one almost eight thousand miles away from Mumbai. Does a bustling metropolis carry the baggage of disobedience and inculcate a sense of lack of discipline under the guise of ‘fast pace of life’, or are people just obeying the law in less dense cities because it hasn’t inconvenienced them yet. Metaphorically speaking, do concrete jungles bring out the animal within you? You are scoffed at or almost made a social outcast if you make the mistake of trying to obey the traffic laws. We bore the brunt of honking cars and screaming strangers as we refused to budge as the clock counted down to zero before budging. I was called an NRI for obeying the rules. I am not sure if that was an insult. You tell me.

cross-posted at Desicritics

Pedestrian-only Street in NYC?

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“In one October afternoon a couple of years ago, between 3 and 7 p.m. we counted 4000 people walking literally in the street, in traffic lanes, because the sidewalks were too crowded. It is clearly a safety issue as well as a quality-of-life issue”, Tim Tompkins, the president of the Times Square Alliance business district [source: NY Times].

The conflict between pedestrians and automobiles on crowded New York streets continue. But as CoolTown Studios notes, pedestrians are clearly favored over automobiles and the day is not far when the area around Times Square might be permanently closed for traffic and might just be one large pedestrian zone; the central area acting as New York ‘public square’. Marketing campaigns in glittering neon signs on Times Square’s prime property strangely do not defile the urbanscape but in a weird way, that blatant display of commercialism actually defines it. Nowhere else, with the exception of Las Vegas, does that hold true.

Marketers might be more likely to use that space for advertising if they have the attention of the consumer for a longer time i.e. when they are walking instead of just whizzing by in cars. The area around Times Square is almost always occupied with awe-stuck tourists who are the only ones standing around gaping at the advertisements and drinking in the famed NYC urbanscape as New Yorkers rush by going about their business. The fact that the busiest subway station (42nd Street) lies directly beneath Times Square also adds to the melee of people walking in and out of the area. It makes sense both urban design-wise and business-wise for Manhattan to have its first pedestrian-only street.

Because It is Fun to Destroy

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The riots in Paris strangely do not have characteristics that plague other conflicts elsewhere at least most of them. The Parisian riots aren’t about religion although the miscreants are largely Muslim; they aren’t about ethnicity although again the miscreants are largely of North African descent. The riots are almost like the opening of floodgates of simmering frustration of oppression and discrimination. The much hyped French society of tolerance and liberty fell apart as the riots spread all over the country and soon the original catalyst of two electrocuted youths from the Muslim ghetto was forgotten. Because it was never about religion or ethnicity but in fact, it was about broken windows.

According to social psychologists and police officers, if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken (Kelling & Coles, 1996). It is a classic case of neglecting a problem and wishing that it never existed. A broken window left unrepaired also smacks of apathy. Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist conducted a simple but insightful experiment. He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx (low-income neighborhood) and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, CA (high-income neighborhood). The results were predictable – the car on the Bronx street was vandalized within “minutes” and after twenty-four hours, everything of value had been stripped. The car in Palo Alto remained untouched.

Zimbardo then did something that produced astonishing results. He smashed part of the automobile in Palo Alto with a sledge hammer. Soon after, the “respectable whites” joined in the carnage and within hours the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed. The quality of the neighborhood thus made no significant difference to the plight of the abandoned automobile; except in the case of the high-income neighborhood, someone was needed to strike the first blow.

Similarly in Paris, thousands of cars were burned mostly in the low-income neighborhood occupied by the minorities but soon similar incidents spread to otherwise quiet towns like Nice in South France. Jane Galt offered a similar reason that is often true of mob violence. She hypothesized that riots were spreading in Paris because “breaking windows and setting cars on fire is fun”. She explains:

“Of course, normally we don’t go around torching automobiles, because the owners of those automobiles would be angry, and we would be arrested, and our friends would look at us funny. But take a group of people who have relatively little to lose from an arrest, since they’re never going to get jobs anyway, and who are, not without reason, permanently angry at the people who own those cars, and thus have very little of the social control that comes from feeling you are in a mutual social contract that protects you as well as the car owners, and add a minor provocation . . . voila! With a peer group giving us permission to bust stuff up, I bet a substantial number of us would go on a rampage too. The riot is only the mirror image of the lynch mob.”

There exists something deeper within the human psyche that derives pleasure from creating havoc and destruction. No wonder action movies where “stuff blows up” are a major attraction. Maybe evolution is not perfect; it still leaves tiny vestiges of our Neanderthal selves within us. Pity the urban planner cannot successfully take into account that part of human character.

Reference:
Kelling, George L. and Coles, Catherine M. Fixing Broken Windows (New York: Martin Kressler, 1996)