Most broken traffic rules

Breaking traffic rules is many time not very obvious to Punekar’s. They don’t even realize that they are breaking the rules and if you try to stop them from doing it, Punekar’s get very cross. However, rules are rules and five most commonly broken traffic rules in Pune are

1. Driving on the wrong side of the road when the road divider strip is continuous: When the road dividing strip is continuous, it means that you are not suppose to cross it and go on the wrong side. When it is double and continuous, it is even stricter. But still people casually cross this line.

2. Cutting the corners: While taking right turns, most of the people do not realize that they are cutting the corner short i. e. they are on the wrong side of the road. Lot of people think that if there are 5-6 oncoming vehicles from the other side, taking the turn early will help then go quickly. But in reality it happens the other way.

3. Crossing the stop line at signals: Punekar’s are always busy looking at other sides’ signal. If they are in the front row, they are so lost in thought that they slowly start coming forward when any other side gets green signal. I have never understood this. When the signal is green, the additional 10 meters that we have crossed when we were waiting hardly matters. Do we do something really significant in the time saved? Also most of the time when crossing the stop line we are preventing the pedestrians from crossing the road. These pedestrians then are caught in the middle of the traffic and cause more hindrance.

4. Driving on the wrong side of the road when the divider does not have any opening nearby: If you do not have enough money to drive extra 100 meters to go to other side of the road, why do you buy the vehicle? Should having enough money to buy the vehicle be the eligibility criteria or should having enough money to buy the fuel be the eligibility criteria?

5. Recognizing other people’s right to way: Everyone on the road has right to way. When some other vehicle is trying to cross the road or trying to take turn, most of us rush in as if we will be losers we give way to others. Many times giving way to one crossing vehicle allows everyone to go in quick time. We do the same to pedestrians as well.

Problem solving PMC way

Pune University square is one of the busiest crossings in Pune. It connects at least 3-4 major areas – Pune University, Aundh, Pashan, Senapati Bapat Road and has few major landmarks around – again the univ, Chatushringi temple, Raj bhavan, Rural Police offices, schools like Loyola’s & St. Joseph’s. During the rush hours this area is completely packed. Until few days back, the flyover work in this area was creating more chaos than what it was trying to solve. But people tolerated all this because the flyover was going to be complete soon and the speed of the traffic was going to increase.

So finally about a month back the flyover was complete and opened for traffic. Everyone was happy and then suddenly someone found out – “Hey! the traffic in this area is too fast and it is dangerous for the pedestrians”. Once again there was some noise created in the Pune Municipal Corporation and the result…

There is a speed limit of 40km/hr in this area.

You spend so much to speed up the traffic in the area and then what do you finally do? Impose speed limit! Wow! what a way to solve a problem!

Congratulations Sakal

This week when every news channel in India is busy covering Sanjay Dutt as hero and trying to portray him at par with Gandhiji, there is one exception. Sakal Papers from Pune has published that they treat Sanjay Dutt as criminal and like other criminals his news will be published on inside pages and he will not be given any special status nor will they try to glorify him.

Though Sanjay Dutt has acted well in the Munnabhai movies and some other like Vastav, he has committed a crime and he is getting punished for his wrong deeds. All good deeds never cancel out the wrong deeds. This is not arithmetic. You stack up both good and bad deeds and they never cancel each other. What can happen at the most is that the good deeds will help you face the bad times but you can not avoid bad time. So let the criminal Sanjay Dutt face the punishment. The good guy in him should make other criminals around him better human beings and not the other way round. Else we are likely to get an actor trained by criminals like Telgi et al. And that will be even worse that what it was some 14 years back.