Driving to / in Chennai

Based on my one data point from Saturday, henceforth I'm not tolerating any criticism of Bangalore traffic from people living in Chennai

OK, I will henceforth not tolerate any criticism of Bangalore traffic from people living in Chennai.

Last Saturday I drove to Chennai for the first time ever. It took 8.5 hours, inclusive of an hour’s break for breakfast. The roads are atrocious, first between Electronic City and Krishnagiri, and then from Kanchipuram onwards. Basically too many road upgradation works have been taken up at the same time, sending you off on diversions every few hundred metres.

This post is not about the highway though, it’s about the roads IN chennai. My wife has been going there fairly frequently over the last year or so, since she teaches at IIT Madras. And every time she returns, she talks highly about Chennai roads, about how they are so wide, and that the traffic is so peaceful and it feels like a big city unlike Bangalore.

On this trip, though, she realised that her observations so far have suffered from selection bias - in terms of the roads that she takes. And this has been true of my experience of roads in Chennai as well.

In general, my knowledge of Chennai is restricted to the area between Central Railway Station and IIT Madras, flanked by Mount Road on the West, and the sea on the East (okay, I know a bit of TNagar / Nungambakkam, and Koyambedu Bus Stand as well). Being a student in IIT, I had no reason to go anywhere else in Chennai.

My last few visits, too (for quizzes at Music Academy, friends’ weddings (all in the aforementioned areas), US visa interviews) have all been concentrated around the “known” areas of Chennai. And in this part of Chennai, my observation holds.

Roads are generally good, even if there are some insanely narrow flyovers. Traffic is pretty smooth, and when you are in an auto rickshaw, it usually zips (pre-agreed fare means driver’s incentive is to get you to your destination asap and have more turnarounds).

This trip, when I was driving, I happened to see more of Chennai, and traffic there is again like the newer parts of Bangalore - largely in a standstill.

When we drove last Saturday, we finished breakfast (near Vellore) at 10:15. Google Maps showed an ETA (at a restaurant in T Nagar where we wanted to have lunch) at 1:45. Maybe I took one wrong turn (after Sriperumbudur, I stayed on the highway, rather than take a right to enter the city via Tambaram), but it was 2 pm by the time we reached that T Nagar restaurant.

The last two hours of that journey were in dense urban (or suburban?) traffic. It was no different than driving in Bangalore. Google Maps suggested one “faster” road, which took us through a road that was at a pinch two cars wide, with a massive ditch on one side. When a tractor appeared on that road, the whole road came to a standstill.

Things did not get better when we entered town - lots of narrow one-lane flyovers. Traffic lights where traffic backed up for a few hundred meters. Mostly narrow roads. Construction of more metros and flyovers (T Nagar / Nungambakkam is now a massive construction site). Our prior of Chennai traffic had been built up on “old Madras” - the part of town we know well (between Central and IIT) had been shattered completely!

Even “known Chennai” seemed to have gotten worse (or I don’t know if it’s a Saturday afternoon thing) - it took 50 mins to go from T Nagar to inside IIT campus (not being helped by some new flyover being built near Madhya Kailash (just east of the IITM main gate, on Sardar Patel Road), and the 20 kmph speed limit within the campus).

Later that evening, IIT to Ranga’s house (Besant Nagar) back to IIT was “normal” enough (again remember this is “known chennai” for us), but the next morning again, as we drove towards Mahabalipuram, it was a trafficky and depressing long stretch of East Coast Road (with a toll booth to boot!).

I’m starting to think it’s a consistent pattern across cities, where “old areas” have reasonably (relatively speaking) decent infrastructure, but the newer areas on the periphery are really atrocious in terms of traffic. And this is not a new problem - in 2006, I had moved to Bombay for my first job, and after 10 days at a hotel in Colaba, I’d moved to Bandra East, and the difference in infrastructure (and roads, and readiness to rains) was massive!

Just that I think in Chennai, there is a larger “core” with good infra, compared to Bangalore. And the wider main roads (such as Mount Road) help as well!

For the longest time I had thought that the reason I would get depressed going to Chennai was because of the experience of catching autos after getting out of Central Railway Station, and had longed to drive into the city. Based on our recent experience I’m surely not doing this again.

Whenever I go next, it’ll surely be by train. At least that way I can stick to “known areas of the city”!