So Hero Honda is planning a Rs 15,000 bike. Yippee, bikes for all, you say. But back the truck up for a minute and think about the chaos that will ensue. Already our cities are choc-a-bloc with woefully inadequate infrastructure that turns a 15-minute commute into a couple of nightmarish hours. Now imagine the situation when 100,000 of these Rs 15,000 bikes pour on to our roads every month. It’s like a time bomb that could go nuclear any moment.
Believe me, these bikes will wreck our cities. For starters they won’t be tiny step-thrus that South East Asia is swarming with. Sure they also cause congestion but being smaller they take up less real estate on the road. No, our 15-grand bikes will be proper bikes because the mindset of the Indian consumer is geared towards bikes.
Then they’ll have to be obscenely fuel efficient. Already we have assorted idiots riding at 40kmph in top gear clogging all the lanes and slowing the rest of us down. Now imagine four times the number of idiots, all in the fast lane, all doing 40kmph on their 15-grand bikes. At least the current bikes have a modicum of power to accelerate out of your way if you honk their brains out. The 15-grand bikers won’t have any reserve power to go anywhere; more mobile chicanes for us to tackle.
They’ll also have the skinniest, cheapest and least grippy tyres you can find and will use the smallest brakes physically possible. So expect more bikes to thump into your rear bumper.
Trust me on this – riders on 15-grand bikes will be the worst on the road. They’ll all invariably be fresh into biking, will have no traffic sense whatsoever and with these bikes having neither the handling nor the braking to get them out of trouble (which will be more often than not) they’ll crash with alarming regularity. Already, barring the silent minority, most riders are spectacularly daft – they dawdle in all the lanes, cut you up for no reason, jump traffic lights and haven’t even the basic mental capacity to realise helmets save lives.
No, we really don’t need the biking equivalent of the one-lakh rupee car which in itself will cause breathtaking congestion what with the current lot of rubbish riders graduating to four wheels. We don’t need the government to be thinking about reducing excise duties on piddly bikes like they’ve done for small cars. What we need is for the government to come up with a viable solution to easing congestion in cities – like better infrastructure and proper public transport. Heck, traffic is becoming so horrible and parking such a nightmare that I’d seriously consider using public transport if only it weren’t an absolute hassle. Let’s be a little responsible on this – the only way to reduce pollution is to have less vehicles on the road, not a zillion 15-grand bikes.
Neither are accident statistics aren’t going to improve with 15-grand bikes pouring out of the woodwork. So what are our policy makers suggesting to reduce accident figures? Limit speed limits on the highway to 50kmph and 80 on the expressways. Now if the speed limit is 50 (and assuming you stick to it) you’ll average around 40kmph and that would mean doing Jaipur-Delhi (270km) in seven hours. When today you would take less than four.
Like, seriously, what’s the point of having a speed limit that nobody, not even cabbies in Indicas, will stick to? When will our policy makers realise that imposing stupid speed limits won’t reduce accidents. The solution is education, stricter licensing procedures and stricter traffic implementation. Sure, accidents are caused by cars going a bit too fast. But more accidents are caused by tractors, trucks and bikes coming down the road on the wrong side, by trucks turning, stopping and parking wherever they feel like, because motorists are blinded by full beams of on-coming vehicles, because our roads are in pitiable condition and are often unlit - and because motorcyclists still ride without helmets on the highways.
