Originally Posted by
yr lttl pwny
the monkey advice) was about India drivers, "They're really good at missing you."
Well, I agree, they are good at missing you, but alot of people do get hit. The statistic that I took with me when I headed to South India to cycle was: India has 5% of the world's motor vehicles but 25% of the world's motor vehicle fatalities.
Here's one of the paragraphs that I wrote about traffic after returning from that trip (on a tandem):
By the end of five weeks though, we never crashed, and except for one goat I can't even recall that we ran into anything. As in the U.S. the traffic law in India seems to be that if you get there first, you have the right to the road. This law is taken to its logical extreme such that there's really no reason to ever look behind you. Pay attention to what's in front, be ready to brake and avoid sudden turns. In this sense I could see order to it all and certainly enjoyed heavy, slower traffic to the far too common high-speed chicken matches with buses which left us more than once bouncing off the edge of the tarmac. It's no surprise that fatal bus accidents are reported almost daily in the newspaper.
You see that paragraph in context with photos from my 2008 trip here:
https://ideotrope.org/index.pl?node_id=74601