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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

> Trucks, in particular, are often not even equipped with side mirrors in the first place.

Maybe mandating side mirrors (or rather enforcing this mandate - I can't quite believe that side mirrors are optional for roadworthiness, even in India) would be a better point to start with, rather than outlawing the phrase "Horn OK Please"?

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The lack of side mirrors is because of hyper-narrow roads and gateways and terrifying traffic. Last time I was in India our driver kept his side mirrors folded down... and the man was capable of manoeuvring his car with micrometer-level accuracy. I can think of dozens of times I cringed expecting a scrape but of course he knew his car perfectly.

There are many situations where those mirrors would have been lost if they'd been open.

Manoeuvring a larger truck would require amazing driving skills, and the width of that truck would make adding side mirrors pointless - you'd lose them the first day out.

"Indian drivers rarely use their side mirrors"

Doesn't matter if the mirrors are there or not if culturally people don't use them.

Yup, the rough heuristic that most drivers follow in India is: if I see empty road ahead of me, I am going in.

I experienced confusion about this when I travelled to Indonesia some years ago, but a local taxi driver made it easy to understand: "What's in front of you is your responsibility." It's an unwritten local driving rule and once you know it, the local traffic is considerably easier to grok. No one looks behind them because everyone's agreed that they only worry about things in front of them. If you want to pass a car in front of you then it's up to you to make it work. Likewise with driving a car in the sea of scooters that Indonesian traffic oftentimes is. Worry about the scooters in front of you, the ones behind you and on your sides will do their best to look out for themselves and don't expect much from you.

I look at the rear mirror all the time, especially before stopping. Is that car behind me too fast and will crash into me? A taxi decided that didn't like me stopping at a pedestrian crossing a few nights ago and overtook me. I honked and both the people crossing the street and the taxi stopped. I think the danger trumped the rule of never honking at night in a city.

Was this in Jakarta or a smaller city?

It was in Milan, Italy. Horns are uncommon but there are some random crazy drivers in hurry to get somewhere :-)

How do people back out into a street there?

My guess is that they back into parking spots to avoid that scenario

Grokked or not, there are more road fatalities.

More or less is relative. In 2019, Indonesia had 15.3 road deaths per 100.000 inhabitants per year [0]. For context, Norway had 2.0, United States had 12.4, and Liberia (the worst on the list) had 35.9, to pick a few random data points. While I definitely agree that the traffic in Indonesia is chaotic and that can lead to more accidents, that doesn't tell the whole story.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

To me, the Fatalities per mile is the most meaningful metric, but that's very sparsely populated on the chart. The next most meaningful metric on that chart is Fatalities per 100k vehicles.

Somali car owners have a 6.5% chance of dying in their vehicles, annually.

A large percentage of road deaths are pedestrians and cyclists. Especially in countries with fewer cars and more pedestrians. So it's more that as a Somali car owner, you have a 6.5% chance of killing somebody with your vehicle, annually.

Still the number seems incredibly high. Maybe the number of registered vehicles is underreported, with many vehicles just not getting officially registered?

I'm not sure if I see how fatalities per 100k vehicles is a better metric than per 100k inhabitants: the composition of vehicles is very different from country to country. Given the example above, in Indonesia I would expect a very considerable portion to be scooters which while more dangerous for the driver themselves are safer for others. Meanwhile in the United States, cars are the big majority, being safer for the driver but more dangerous to others.

Great explanation, also astonishing at how relatively well this system works in response to lax training. All things considered.

Also, it’s easier to understand when you see the relative speeds of traffic and the relative lack of safety.

This is how skiing works. You worry about what is in front of you. People behind you have to worry about themselves.

Indian driving is like ant colony, but it's humans.

Way my colleagues told me, circulation is such a mess there’s no way you can check all around you (plus what’s that going to change, defensive driving in bumper-to-bumper traffic means complete paralysis) so the only things you look at are in front, and the people following have to be ready.

Needless to say I opted out of driving, crossing roads is as far as I took the challenge of directly interacting with indian circulation.

>Way my colleagues told me, circulation is such a mess there’s no way you can check all around you

It's not so much that you can't, but that most people don't and with no driver education and no enforcement of traffic rules, you are stuck in a shitty nash equilibrium. I learnt driving in Canada, and I have tried to continue the same driving habits in India - because that is the only way I feel safe while driving. I simply can not change lanes without checking the rear-view mirrors and a shoulder-check because I am utterly terrified of what could happen if I don't.

At the same time, I am also completely aware about how 99.9% of drivers on the road are operating. So, I have to be cautious that any car could try to nose their way into the road in front of me even when I have right-of-way because that's just how things work here. It is stressful and horrible.

It's probably going to change as they get more cars, more highways and better driver educations. It's probably going to take decades.

No change is automatic. Why will it change just because there are more cars and more highways? And where is the push for better driver education? There is none.

It comes naturally as you start wanting to move faster and get better cars.

You can't go 130kmph honking your way through mopeds and rickshaws.

In many places no cars have mirrors. They get smashed off by other cars promptly. Driving is more akin to number cars

I spent a month in Cuba in 2008 and though I didn't see any signs telling people to honk when overtaking, everyone was doing it on the highway.

A lot of cars in Cuba are in terrible shape, but it might also have to do with the fact that the Autopista 1 is in very bad condition. You really have to focus on avoiding the massive potholes, so you have less time to pay attention to your surroundings. Honking helps the driver in front to make sure to swerve away from you while you're overtaking on the next pothole.

I guess the hearing impaired can't drive in India.

And you can't drive too long before becoming hearing impaired.

Side mirrors are used by vehicle in front and horns by vehicle behind. they are not the same.

Moreover, large trucks and busses have a large blindspot, and can't check behind them. So, vehicles behind them, can only honk to make them aware that they are there.

If everybody follow simple traffic rules there's absolutely no need for the vehicle behind a truck to have the need to make the truck aware they are there.

1. Vehicle behind must keep distance, no tailgating.

2. Vehicle ahead should not change lanes before

   a) Making sure the marking on the road says it is permitted.

   b) Signaling the maneuver with directional lights. 

   c) Checking the side mirror before actually starting the maneuver.

That's basically how it works in the rest of the world. Trucks have large blind spots everywhere else, but by signalling their maneuvers in advance and with the other drivers following some simple rules, lots of places in the world (including a lot of poor countries in Latin America) get by with reserving the use of honks only for true urgent situations.

edit: line-breaks

I agree and people are exeggerating the usage of horns more than it actually is.

> there's absolutely no need

But one use of horn that I found useful in India was to overtake on 2-lane hilly road. Now theoretically you should be able to see, may be hundred metres, ahead of you before you start the overtake or if you are not too keen to reach your destination, not overtake at all till you reach straight road with longer view. In practice though, trucks are slow moving and roads sometimes don't provide clear view of the road with twists and turns so it helps if you let the truck ahead of you know of your presence. Then truck dirver signals you with his hand when it is safe to overtake with his longer FOV. Apart from that, truck driver knowing of your presence can help him slow down his vehicle in case oncoming vehicle is cutting it too close for you to overtake the truck.

Is there a better way of doing this? Probably, by just avoiding any risky overtake by road markings etc. but as I said above, that could mean following the truck for few hours in the worst case. And does that mean you honk everytime you are behind a truck? Not at all.

> Is there a better way of doing this?

Yes, you don't overtake if you don't have visibility because of a hill or a bend. That is enforced by traffic regulation and road markings in Europe and most of the places I've driven. And yes, that means that sometimes you get stuck behind trucks for a long time but it also means that nobody gets killed.

Modern trucks in the western world have plenty of power to be surprisingly nimble negotiating ascents, it is downhill that things get more complicated for modern trucks.

If you read my comment carefully, I understand that and I know how it happens around the world. But I personally would prefer to sometimes hear a horn rather than having to drive behind a slowest moving truck for hours because the hilly road has road marking catering for the worst case.

What I say above makes it sound like I think that it's sole responsibility of the drivers to keep to the rules but I do understand that the rules are much easier to follow when the vehicles are in good condition and the roads have amenities like escape routes for trucks and occasional third lanes to allow overtake, both of which require wealth and strong institutions that are not present everywhere in the world.

Still, from my experience in India (mostly in and around Delhi) what you get is not an occasional honk, it is a permanent infernal cacophony that pierces through your skull day and night.

first have to solve the problem of efficient and effective regulation of anything in a country of a billion people that doesn’t currently do that

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