Car Stories - Part 2 (My Adventures on U.S Roads)

I  have previously written about how car-addicted society U.S is here. Then I lamented about how I am not able to do anything because I don't have a car. So now I bought a car. I wrote about my first impressions about driving on U.S roads here. So these are some of my experiences driving the car in a utterly new country. I do know the rules - Stop at stop sign, maintain speed limit, yield and drive on right side of the road etc - or otherwise how could they have given me license.  Somethings which we take from granted in India cannot be done here and therein lies the problem.

Two big things which you cannot do here are - 1.  you cannot stop and ask anyone for directions (Actually nobody walks on the roads - so even if you tried to do this, you will find no one to ask. And if you really tried to go near someone - they might be afraid that you have guns and shoot you before you even speak a word) 2. You cannot stop on the road wherever you want or TURN BACK or other direction once you passed it. So even though I know these things, the effects of these are not so clear if you don't experience it. So without further ado, this is my story.

Story 1: Even before I bought my car, I wanted to visit the temple at Bridgewater once. I was just interested to see how different it is from our temples. So when I bought a car, I wanted to drive there. I didn't have a GPS set at that time, so I hesitated a bit. But the Google maps application on my phone came to my rescue. I put the address in the maps and followed the instructions and successfully reached the temple. I was happy that I was able to drive that far without any problems. So I was a little relaxed when I was going back. The temple is at Exit 17 (think mile marker 17, except that you can go out of the highway only at that place) and my home was at Exit 40 on I-287.  It is a four lane highway on one side i.e 8 lane highway. We can enter and exit only from the rightmost lane i.e the exit lane. I was travelling on the lane to the left of the exit lane till exit 39. I was happy that I was about to reach my home. Suddenly I saw that I was not going towards exit 40 but I am on a different highway I-80. Thank Google, my phone gps safely brought me back to my home. Later I realized that highways merge into other highways and if you are not careful you might go into some other road and you might have trouble reaching your destination. So I came back after half an hour I was supposed to come home.

Story 2:  My friend Murali is with me now and he started enjoying whenever I went on a wrong route and took a detour. Now my GPS has a penchant of choosing highways over local roads. I don't have a way of knowing the route beforehand in GPS and I will get the instruction only in time. Sometimes it can give you instructions too late and then.. read the story. There is a highway near to our road with number 46.  We wanted to go to a grocery shop on the highway where I haven't gone before. So I put in the address in the GPS and started going.  I expected it to take me to 46 directly but instead my GPS has a penchant for choosing highways even if the destination is a mile apart. So instead of taking me on the local highway 46, it gave me instructions to on I-80. As in previous story, I enter highway 280 which divides into highway I-80. My GPS asks to keep left so that I can merge into I-80. So i was in the left lane, I merged into I-80 in the second lane from left and I had to pass two more lanes to get into exit lane.   Two seconds after I merged to I-80 my GPS asks me to go the rightmost lane and exit in about a 100ft. How the hell can I just pass two lanes to the right without knowing it before hand. So I did as you expected. I missed the exit. As I cannot go back, I had to look for the next exit. I had to take and missed exit 47. The next exit was exit 53, 6 miles ahead. So I had to go all the way to exit 53 and go in a roller coaster, yes three lanes going right, two lanes to the left, two lanes forward, get out of the highway, turn back and come on to the highway and travel all the way 6 miles back again and I reached my starting point again. For a half an fifteen minutes journey it was already one hour and I was again at my starting point. I started again to go to the shop as I was determined to see if I can follow the instruction of the GPS. This time as I knew that I had to take exit 47, I cleared the lanes fast and reached the exit lane just in time. This taught me another lesson  - Never trust GPS blindly. Always review the route beforehand on google maps so that you will have an idea of where to take the next turn. Or be ready to travel 12 miles more for a grocery store nearby. To give you an idea of how superb the roller coaster ride was just see the image above.

My Car & Road

I got my first car last week, an old Toyota Corolla car and I am just driving to and from office.This is not a new fact but the roads here are amazing. Once I get on the highway, there are very very few interruptions and I can drive straight without looking for anyone coming from other side and that is a far more pleasant experience.

Its so great that they were able to plan 50 yrs ahead in 1960 when these higways were built. They are still quite good. May be I seem too pessimistic, but roads are one area where we don't have much hope when the chairman of the NHAI says it is not completely clean. Ofcourse nobody expected it to be clean anyway but all this has to change. Ofcourse, logical arguments like these never convinced anyone and I will write another post on it soon. 

US - Addicted to Cars a.k.a Car Stories

Image by Xabier.M via Flickr

Car Story 1:I and my colleague were going to a restaurant in a car and we saw a US citizen stop and give way to pedestrians.My colleague asked me to think of how the situation would be in India, where pedestrians will be waiting for a long time to cross a road. I said that they can afford to do that because people on cars is far greater than people walking on road. If people in India wait for passersby on the road then, they will be waiting for ever. Now you can understand how the situation is. One of my friends mom came for visiting US and she said that there are more cars here than people. If you are a first time visitor to the US, what strikes you is the ubiquity and indispensability of cars.

Car Story 2:You cannot do anything here without cars. People say that the first thing you have to get here is SSN. But I would say its not that. It is a car. Yes. If you dont have it, you are at the mercy of the cab drivers. I wanted to go to Walmart to buy some items. If it was in Hyderabad, I would have taken a bus and gone for shopping and even after changing some buses atleast I would have surely gone and shopped and returned. But here there is no such way. It is approximately three miles from my place. And I cannot walk till there. I had to book a cab, go shop and return in a cab.

Car Story 3: But I am not a person who gives up so easily. I wanted to explore public transport options. Usually I go to and come from office with a colleague and our journey takes approximately half an hour each way. And today my colleague is on leave. But I had to go to the office. So I looked up on google for the public transit options. There was a railway station in walkable distance (Lucky mee..!! ) . Here all the public transit options are towards New York and there are no cross cutting routes. Hence I had to go all the way to New York and then go back to where I work. So the up journey from Edison to New York was one hour and from New York to BernandsVille a station near my office took another hour. So totally a half an hour drive took two hours on public transit without car. And that railway station was nearly one mile from our office. So I had to walk all the way in the chilly weather. Thats when I decided the first thing I would get if I am going to stay for some time in US is a car.

Car Story 4: One of my colleagues took pity on my condition and offered to drop me home. It felt like ARR music to my ears. We were sitting in the car and he asked me what is the exit which I should take on my way home. I told I didn't know it and suggested that we stop on the way and ask someone where we should go. He pointed me to the road and asked me whom to ask. Everyone had a car and where whizzing past without giving even a look sideways. We were not able to find a single person on the road. Of course, the US people had a solution for it though. It is the ingenious GPS solution. You enter the address in the GPS machine and it will give you driving directions.. how cool it is.. but still not helpful at all to one who doesn't have a car.. 

But with this 4 stories I am more or less convinced that US is addicted to cars and due to the non-dependence on public transport, it is not improving to service additional routes. Hope you enjoyed this post. Comments are welcome... :)