During the six weeks I spent in India this year, I learned that India is very different than the U.S. in many different ways, one of which being how people drive. The differences were evident as soon as I landed and still bewilder me today. Let me explain why.
1. Motorcycles!
You see them EVERYWHERE in India, whereas you hardly see any in New York (unless you count biker gangs.) They're convenient to use and work well with the extreme traffic and narrow streets by letting you weave between cars.
2. Auto rickshaws!
You've never experienced driving in India until you've ridden in one of these iconic narrow three-wheeled vehicles that are India's equivalent of yellow taxis. They are operated just like motorcycles but can fit three passengers!
3. Driving on the opposite side of the road
Americans drive on the right side of the road and Indians drive on the left. It came as quite a shock to me when I first arrived. The driver and passenger seats for the cars are also reversed.
4. Signals (or lack thereof)
Most Indians who drive barely use their signals to weave between traffic, which makes driving on the roads fairly tricky because cars tend to cut each other off. Judgment calls are used a lot more often than signals in India.
5. Extreme traffic
Imagine crunching over one billion people in a country smaller than Brazil. Yeah, that's what I thought, too. Given the narrow roads and the hundreds of millions of people on the road at any given time, it's not hard to expect extreme traffic in Indian cities, especially due to improper lane discipline and lack of signal use.
6. People crossing the street
Given the extreme traffic, it's quite interesting to see just how people cross roads in India unscathed. Cars can come without warning and so do pedestrians.
7. Animals crossing the street
You can often see the occasional cow casually striding through Indian roads. Cars also tend to skirt around cows that walk in the streets, often causing extreme traffic.
8. Extreme pollution
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Since so many Indians are on the road, whether on motorcycles, buses, or cars, it is to be expected that so many emissions are released. This often results in the air being filled with a layer of smog that can make it hard to breathe or in extreme cases, see.
9. Manual gears
Unlike the U.S., most Indian cars use manual gears as opposed to automatic gears. This is pretty much due to the better mileage you can get with manual gears and because these cars are cheaper than their automatic variants.
10. Multilingual street signs
English isn't the only official language in India—Hindi is a widely spoken language, too, so highway signs often reflect those two languages consistently. And in different Indian states like Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, you see different signs that use the official languages of each state, such as Tamil and Telugu.
11. Horns!
I've heard three times as many horn honks in six weeks in India compared to 36 weeks in the U.S. This only gets worse in traffic when cars are trying to weave around each other.
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