Driving in India

Expats frequently complain about driving in Doha, but ever since we visited India I've struggled to articulate how very much worse the Qatari roads could be. It's hard to explain how much being in traffic in Delhi or Varanasi was like one long near-death experience. It's really quite breathtaking, actually: traffic flows remarkably smoothly (and distressingly quickly), given that there are almost no traffic lights, vehicles do not always obey the drive-on-the-left rule, and the roads are being shared by vastly different forms of transportation (trucks, cars, rickshaws, bicycles, pedestrians, many many many feral animals).

But thanks to Boingboing, I now have this visual demonstration to help explain it to people.

I don't know where this video was taken, but compared to where we traveled I think this road is actually less chaotic than average, and remarkably free of wandering water buffalo.