My Daily Adventure Ride

Please do not get into conclusions about me being exploratory or daring, just by reading the title of the post. Yeah, it is an adventurous ride that I’m talking about. But, there is around one tenth of Pune’s total population that joins me in this ride every weekday. Yeah, I’m talking about my daily trip from home to office.

It is an adventure ride because the road is never the same in any two consecutive days. If it were a perfectly maintained road, I could have travelled the one way distance from home to office in at most 15 minutes. Alas, that is never the case. It is almost one and a half years since I started working here. This particular road has never been what you would call a tarred road.

Every morning you see a new pothole in the road. The older ones get bigger along with the appearance of new ones. When some of them grow to the size of small ponds, they (I don’t exactly know who) fill them up with wet mud!!! Just think about it… wet mud??? Once in a while, they fill them with melted tar, and just the tar… no reinforcement. This is the way one of the busiest roads in Pune is maintained.

If you have a car, you are bound to be stuck in this stretch for at least 45minutes. Luckily, I have a bike, which helps me avoid some of those deep holes, though it still is a roller coaster ride. But it is not just the road that causes all this commotion. The attitude of people is another major issue. Tell me, if you are stuck in a traffic jam, where you can see that there is a huge line of cars waiting to move in front of you, what is the whole point of honking loudly at the vehicle right in front of you??? Will he/she be able to fly over the whole jam so that you get one or two feet advancement??? This is what I get to endure almost all days when I’m stuck in a traffic jam.

Another thing is, when in a jam, with the formation of one or two lines of cars in a direction of traffic flow, you get to see a huge number of bike riders taking the wrong way, either from the left or the right side, to get to the front, which eventually results in a much more blocked traffic, which would take another hour or so to move.

On top of all these, you will be bathed in dust cloud all through the trip. I guess, there is more dust in this stretch, than there is over 200 kilometers of highway trip from Pune to Mumbai. Now the road works department has started doing something about this road, (guess they are planning to widen the road), which has been going on for around 4-5 months, though there is not much of improvement in the total landscape. What I cannot understand is, why do not the authorities give much importance to such matters when this particular stretch is one of the most used roads in Pune with huge amount of traffic flowing in and out every day. I know that this is not an isolated case, and many of you must be facing similar situation every day, but I just felt like sharing my frustration with you.