A peek at the worst traffic in the world
Posted June 17, 2013 9:45 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – If you hit a few slow-downs on the way in to work, don’t sweat it!
News1130 is getting a little perspective from a driver who has braved some of the worst traffic in the world.
Andrew Younghusband is host of Don’t Drive Here, premiering tonight on The Discovery Channel. The show features some of the craziest, most congested cities around the globe, including Bangkok, Ulaanbaatar, and Mexico City. The first episode focuses on Delhi, India.
“The concept of the show is I drive as many vehicles as I can over the course of a week to learn the local driving culture. At the end of the week, I drive with a professional driver and see if I can handle the gig as well as they can,” Younghusband tells News1130.
“To put it in perspective, how nutty the traffic scene is there, I interviewed the chief of the traffic police in Delhi. That man did not get behind the wheel, saying ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t drive here,'” he tells us.
“He told me they recognize, identify, and allow 43 different types of vehicles on the road; that’s everything from a tricycle to a bicycle to a motorcycle to a horse-drawn carriage to a cattle-drawn carriage… cabs, trucks, tuk tuks, strange rickshaws. [There are] 43 types of vehicles and there isn’t one single road that’s specifically for any one type of vehicle. Any vehicle can go on any road and there is no such thing as going too slow, it’s madness,” Younghusband laughs.
He adds elephants are allowed on the road in Delhi.
“There are animals, people, all sorts of different types of transportation devices and I’m there driving a tuk tuk, a taxi and a delivery truck, just trying to survive. I was honestly terrified in Delhi. Honestly terrified.”
Younghusband started and ended his experience in India with a taxi driver, who was very up-front about what it takes to navigate the streets of Delhi.
“If you are patient and relaxed, you will go nowhere because everybody must always take any available space. He was adamant that I be as aggressive as humanly possible behind the wheel to the point where he was not just encouraging me but yelling at me to go into oncoming traffic! Sure enough, if you hesitated for a second, other people would go into the oncoming lane and then dart back inside and try to get their way around the motorcycles and the mopeds and everything on the road. It was crazy.”
“That same guy nearly lost his mind when I did a shoulder check. He said, ‘What are you looking behind you for? You need to be concerned with what’s in front of you!’ I thought it was just him, but then every single person I drove with in Delhi had a little meltdown when I did a shoulder check because what if someone in front of you stops? What if the guy in front of you swerves around a donkey cart and you didn’t even see the cart and it’s going 2 km/h?”
The takeaway for Younghusband was to be prepared for absolutely anything to happen at any time.
“You, in turn, can do absolutely anything. You can swerve erratically. The cab driver said, ‘Watch, I will zig-zag for you,’ and he started zig-zagging all over the road randomly and people were prepared for that. He demanded I start swerving all over the road. It’s difficult, on an emotional level, to do!”
Younghusband has filmed six episodes of Don’t Drive Here for the first season. They take place in Delhi, India; Bangkok, Thailand; Mexico City; Lima, Peru; Manila, the Philippines; and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. But he won’t single out any one experience as the most memorable or frightening.
“Crashing a moped in Thailand scared me pretty good. Driving a three-wheeled fruit cart in Lima scared the living hell out of me. Being in Manila driving a leftover jeep from the Second World War that was tricked out into a chopped, long-body people mover… then there was driving a truck in Delhi — this truck had no third gear, no horn, the brakes were really slack, no turn signals, it felt like I was in a Jimmy Stewart movie from the 1940s. You could turn the wheel that much and go in a straight line. It was harrowing, terrifying and everybody, everywhere I went had stories of seeing people get killed.”
Don’t Drive Here: The World’s Most Dangerous Roads premieres at 7 o’clock tonight on Discovery.
