Getting Around in Auto-Rickshaws

Note: I hope to add some pictures and videos to this later.

To get around Bangalore, we've mostly been riding auto-rickshaws (hereinafter, “Mario Karts”). Mario Karts are little scooters with lawn-mower engines and a covered passenger compartment and they operate like taxis. They have meters to calculate fares, but the driver will usually quote a flat rate higher than what the meter to your destination would be. For white people, the markup is even higher, and can in extreme cases be as much as 1000%.

There are several ways to establish what you will pay for a ride in a Mario Kart. The first is to simply accept the quoted fare. For example:

Me (getting ready for some good old-fashioned negotiation): Bashyaham Circle, Sankey Road.
Driver: 50 rupees
Beth: OK.

If you're only going to be here for a short while, this is actually a viable option. You'll pay more than you should, but 50 rupees, while twice as much as the meter would have been, is still only a dollar, and that fare was for three people. Or as many as you can fit. Heather, Sunil, Clint, and Charlotte all ride around in one Mario Kart, with one ass sticking out each side.

The second option is to insist on using the meter. This is a good way to get an extra little tour of the city. We've paid 25, 35, and 40 rupees, all for the same trip (our hotel ↔ MSRI), and gone a different way each time. Again, we're being ripped off, but we see more of the city that way, the rides are still a lot of fun for us (surely you've wished you could ride in a Mario Kart for real at times), and the fare is still less than a dollar.

The third option is to negotiate a flat rate. The best way to do that is to be Indian. The second best way is to know what the meter to your destination would be and what the markup, based on supply and demand at that particular time of day and which even Indians have to pay, should be. Neither of those is really feasible for us, so we've been using options one and two most of the time, although I did talk one driver down from 80 to 75 yesterday for a ride to MG Road.

The Mario Karts operate in the same space as all other traffic (buses, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, and even pedestrians), although there is a general custom of faster vehicles on the right (they drive on the left here, British-style). Vehicles may not cross the center line unless they intend to eventually cross back. Lane markings are completely irrelevant. One cross-section of three lanes might contain up to seven or eight vehicles, even more when they stop at a red light and fill in the gaps to try to get a good start when the light turns green.

All vehicles are driven pretty aggressively, and margins are pretty tight, but there don't seem to be any hard feelings. The only times we've heard one driver yell at another (remember, there are a lot of Mario Karts, bicycles, and motorcycles, all of which are open air, and the whole thing, while action-packed, never reaches really high absolute speeds, so the drivers can and occasionally do yell at each other) is when someone blocks traffic. Being cut off is not taken personally.

In fact, it's pretty much anything goes as far as passing. To complete a pass, you simply have to get some part of your vehicle in front of theirs, so that their only options are to accept that you have passed them or run into you. Usually, passing drivers will honk to indicate that that condition is about to come to pass. The drivers are assertive, but no one wants a collision, so the system works pretty well. That each type of vehicle has its own combination of speed, acceleration, maneuverability, and size makes the whole thing really quite fascinating to watch, especially from within.

One or more honks for each pass, combined with all the honking when a driver would like a vehicle in front of him to move faster, makes for a lot of honking. You can hear honking pretty much constantly in most spots, including, of course, my hotel room, from 8 a.m. to well past 10 p.m.

The best part is, I shit you not, Bangalore is considered to have some of the most laid-back traffic in India.