Indians are famous for their unwillingness to stand in line. Whether at the train station or market, its not "first-come, first-served" but "push your way to the front". I don't know where this attitude originates from... maybe its a consequence of the sheer quantities and densities of people, maybe its a reaction to limited quantities of goods and services, and maybe its just the system they choose. Either way, it works as the law of the land.

This system is also applied to traffic. Many of the highways are 1.5 lane roads, where you pass when you can. Vehicles go a variety of speeds, from ox-cart slow to normal driving speed, so this works pretty well in utilizing the entire road and getting people where they need to go.

This morning, however, a set of circumstances arose that were entirely unsuitable for this system. It happened at a railroad crossing. The gates came down, and the cars and buses had to wait for them to be raised again. (Bicycles and motorcycles were able to weave their way through.) The problem occurred when people saw the traffic built up and decided to go around. The end result when the gates went up were two lanes of traffic on each side of the tracks facing each other and at a deadlock. What was already a traffic delay became a fairly intractable traffic jam as the traffic has to squeeze down from two lanes into one, with the one lane itself being blocked by the oncoming traffic. I guess this is usually why we take the route that avoids taht intersection.