straight on the roads

one more post on road behavior..

soon after moving to bangalore - almost 20 years now - i had to depend on others to get directions to go from one place to another, as i was not familiar with the roads.

one lesson i learnt very soon was to not ask for directions when there was more than one person together.
the problem was that in bangalore, there are multiple routes to reach point B from point A. in many cases you have the option of choosing one of the many roads at a junction [more on that in a bit].

When there is more than one person, everyone will be very eager to help. and they can not easily agree what directions to give you. one would say - this is the shortest route, while another might say that another option would be the fastest and a third would say that for a two wheeler, it is better to go in a third road etc etc etc.
in all this, you and your question would become just incidental and each one would want to substantiate their position.

so, i try to find a single person - a shopkeeper, an auto driver or even a lone pedestrian, to ask for directions nowadays.

with multiple roads meeting at a junction - such as the south end cirlce, no two roads would align at a normal 'straight' angle - of 90 or 180 degree. while giving directions, one would say 'go straight' - leaving you wondering which is the straight road!

One view from the BTIS camera of the South End circle in Bangalore.
what takes the cake in getting directions is to figure out how one would take a turn at a dead end!
that is only till you figure out a dead end need not be a dead end, but a T-junction.

in an earlier post, i had mentioned that many road names need qualifiers. it is not just with road names.
recently, i was to meet someone visiting bangalore at the kumaraswamy layout bus stand,  - which was close to where he was staying.

after a lot of difficulty and figuring out the right turn to take  [as my directions were to go straight, when, in deed i needed to make a deep left - as most of the traffic flowed and not go by the geometric straight, which led me to a 'dead end'!], i got to know that there were TWO bus stands in kumaraswamy layout!