things that well and truly suck: part 2

Our office is on the 5th (or 6th, or 7th, depending on how you count) floor overlooking a heavily-traveled, 12-lane road with a crude divider made of concrete and, in some spots, rough boulders. Many, many people have to cross this street throughout the day, and their only option is to wander through moving traffic. It's something that shocks you when you first get here (seriously, we spent a LOT of time staring out the window, mouths agape, when we first got here last summer), but you get used to it. You even do it yourself--maybe not on the road by the office, but on the smaller roads on the way to the market near your house, or when you're walking around downtown, or whatever. Once in a while you see a pedestrian crossing light, but like all traffic signals in Bombay, it is ignored. If you want to cross a street, you have to step into traffic.

People on the road by the office typically have to pause and stand on the divider before they can progress across the second half of the street. Today we suddenly heard lots of shouting, enough that people jumped up from their desks and ran to look out the window. There was a huge crowd of people in the middle of the street, literally rocking a bus back and forth in an apparent attempt to tip it over. Our first thought was that it had to do with the political strife that's been troubling the city lately, because buses have been frequent targets (Anil says something like 150 buses in Bombay have been damaged this past week--by thrown rocks, by being set on fire, that kind of thing).

But that wasn't it. I think the rocking of the bus was in hopes of dislodging it from the boulders underneath it that were preventing its being moved. What had happened, we found out later, was that the bus had swerved out of control, and had torn through/over the rocky center divider and taken four pedestrians with it, killing three of them.

The traffic jam that ensued for the next couple of hours was remarkable even for this street.


Honestly I am surprised we don't see accidents like that more often. Part of it may be that the street is so crowded that the vehicles can't usually attain deadly speeds.

It wasn't a great day to be near buses. This is what we got stuck behind on the drive home:


Updated 2/16 to add: According to this article in the Times of India, two of the pedestrians were killed, not three.