In our two weeks on the traffic-choked streets and byways of India, our drivers amazingly only collided with two motorcycles and one boat. And while some terse words were exchanged, no one was hurt. Good thing, too, because in the book Sylvia was reading on the trip -- based on a real life story -- a taxi driver was dragged from his cab in India and beaten to death after causing a traffic pile up! On our last day, we stopped for a little while to watch the activity at a motor vehicle driver licensing test site, where we learned that Indians really are trained to thread their two and four-wheelers through needles. The test course consisted of figure eights and a kind of "slalom" course with tightly spaced gates. But as we have learned, technical "proficiency" doesn't necessarily translate into vehicular order on the road. Regional and local authorities are trying to do even more to educate the populace on safer driving habits. In Delhi and Agra, a new helmet law had gone into effect for drivers of motorcycles and scooters. Many male drivers actually wore them -- although virtually none of their female passengers did, many of whom rode side-saddle, and sometimes with a baby in arms. In Mumbai, I saw a poster for a day-long festival dedicated to road safety, featuring a performance by a troupe of dancing traffic cops! In Kerala, Jeff saw an article in the local newspaper announcing that with the opening of a new stretch of divided highway, there was going to be a public education campaign to teach people to actually adhere to the formal rules of the road: to observe lane makers and stay within them, to drive only in one direction in each lane, to obey traffic signals, to use rear-view and outside mirrors to confirm the road is clear before pulling into traffic, to use headlights at night and to not stop or park a car smack in the middle of the road. These things are second nature to us here (and virtually everywhere else we've been in the world), but let's just say we hope the rules actually catch on sometime soon in India, where motor vehicle sales are expected grow by the millions in each of the next several years.
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