[sridhu]

Originally Posted by GTO

... says that the average person spends 38,000 hours behind the wheel .

Bah! In Bangalore, we spend that much time just at our favourite traffic jam like Silk Board or Eco Space in ten years!

Seriously, a friend of mine spent from 7:00 to 1:00 AM getting thru Silk Board. Admittedly it had rained.

May be we should start a thread for what is the longest time one has spent in a jam.

I personally have been in one spot on M25 (?) for over 6 hours in the UK with the shoulder open right next to me and an exit tantalisingly visible close. Missed the flight to India and spent ~ Ukp 200 on calls on the cabbies' cell phone (this was in 1997) getting the office to rebook

The worst jam was when I took 5 hours to cross a 1 km stretch in Royapuram in a Tata Sumo. My leg muscles are still well defined because of that jam!

[GTO]

Originally Posted by sridhu

May be we should start a thread for what is the longest time one has spent in a jam.

Fantastic thread idea. Done .

I'm lucky that most of my driving is at nights & weekends. And - *touches wood* - I don't recollect anytime that I've spent more than 2 to 3 hours in a jam. Even that was a rarity.

When Mumbai was deluged with floods on 26th July 2005, I happened to be in my Jeep. Drove through water, over abandoned footpaths and broken dividers and reached home. Don't think it was more than 3 hours. This, in a situation where many people slept overnight in their cars. All thanks to my 4x4 .

[silverado]

A very relevant thread for todays times. Maybe we all should also mention distance over which the time was taken to give a good picture.

A friend of mine took 2.5 hours to travel merely 3.6 kms.
From Phoenix mall lower parel to Dadar firebrigade at 9pm during weekday.

Maybe someone should start a separate thread for Elphistone bridge

I took 2 hours to travel 6.5 kms from Bandra to Dadar recently in a Bus on Saturday afternoon.

There are horror stories of people taking 4-5 hours to reach Borivali/Dahisar from Bandra/Mahim during evening rush hour.The Jam on Western Express highway is so bad, that most UBER/OLA drivers hate doing those trips since the trip count is only 1 after such a long time, which hurts their incentives.

[arun_josie]

Crossing Narmada via old bridge @ Bharuch/Ankleshwar - GJ, 2015

It took close to 3 hours to cross this place. Spend most of the time parked between the trucks. Luckily I have not faced such situation in bangalore traffic till date.

[silverado]

Originally Posted by arun_josie

Crossing Narmada via old bridge @ Bharuch/Ankleshwar - GJ, 2015

The actual golden bridge also was notorious for jams while work was going on for new bridge.

This thread will live long, our waiting times are surely going to go higher.
And this thread i believe is specifically for normal traffic jams excluding some natural calamities/or any man-made stoppages ( Rasta-Roko etc )

Sorry mods, i remembered this incident now.
A friend had gone to drop a colleague to Pune Airport ( Who was flying to Dubai ) from Wakad ( approx distance is 25-30 kms ).
The guy reached Dubai, before my friend could reach home at Wakad! was stuck in Jam for almost 3-4 hours.

[ajayclicks]

Voted 4-5 hours for the same Ankleswar bridge. Got royally stuck during my drive to Rajasthan about two years back.

[AltoLXI]

I still remember that day - a decade back, when the party in power now held a massive rally in Palace grounds in Bangalore grid locking the entire North Bangalore for around 6 hours. I was stuck in the jam (on my two wheeler) for nearly 4 hours and sadly I was just 3 kms away from my home. .

I still cannot erase that from my memory and have developed an association with the party name and the infamous jam it created.

[VKumar]

On the day next to 'Shahi Snan' in the recent Kumbh Mela of Haridwar, around 1.4 crore people were in the city and majority of them were returning back either on same day or the next one.
I spent around 11 hours and 40 minutes just to cover a 41 kms section that day as the vehicles coming from Haridwar side first blocked their side and then the others started coming in the opposite direction on our side of median, it was a catastrophe with all arterial roads blocked and either bottlenecks or complete choke on the highway at places; heck, entire 41 kms was a bottleneck with multiple full chokes.

[vivek95]

Voted for "never spent over 2 hours in any jam"

City traffic :-
My worst experience was taking 45 mins to cross a stretch of 500 metres at Mulund, Mumbai one afternoon. There was no accident, protest or anything. It was just the sheer volume of traffic.


Highway traffic :-
I have a couple of times got stuck in insane traffic on Mumbai--Pune Expressway taking 30 mins to cross a stretch of 1 km, again due to sheer volume of traffic and crawling trucks. I am sure people would have guessed by now, the spot on Mumbai--Pune Expressway which is famous for these traffic snarls - Amrutanjan bridge and the preceding 2 kms ! ( Driving in Mumbai to Pune direction )

[sumeethaldankar]

10+ hours Aug 29 2017 in Mumbai. This was during the incessant rains in Mumbai last year. Left office at 3:30 PM and reached home at 1:30 AM the next day. Car was the Civic. I must have switched the car on off atleast more than 50 times as we crawled through the mess. At the end of the journey I had to even drive to a feet of water which resemble a sea. I was pretty anxious as water was getting splashed by heavier vehicles but the Civic managed to 'sail' through.

[Gannu_1]

Originally Posted by arun_josie

Crossing Narmada via old bridge @ Bharuch/Ankleshwar - GJ, 2015

Originally Posted by ajayclicks

Voted 4-5 hours for the same Ankleswar bridge. Got royally stuck during my drive to Rajasthan about two years back.

Count me in as well guys. Same spot, 2 hours during a fine winter day. Was driving to Ahmedabad as wife had a meeting to attend at 10 AM. Reached there after the meeting concluded!

Here's the post from the route query thread:

Originally Posted by Gannu_1

Well guys, we had a terrible time last Saturday. I felt really unfortunate but alas, we had no other way.

We departed from Navsari at 4 AM, reached the NH-8 bypass at Bharuch around 5:15 AM (no breaks in between) and crossed this bypass (a stretch of 17 km) at 7:20 AM.

Attachment 1327006

We spent 2 LONG hours at this horrible stretch amidst trucks! The most horrible time I’ve ever had so far getting stuck in traffic. It felt really deplorable by the time we got past this stretch and I was in no mood to drive ahead. But we had no other go. I felt like calling up my wife’s HR department and giving them a piece of my mind for informing her about this meeting at the last moment! To make matters worse, there was a long queue at the L&T IDPL toll booth and we lost 40 minutes there. Even worse, there is a flyover construction underway just before the expressway start at Baroda, vehicles were being diverted through a bad stretch and we lost another 30 minutes there. We reached Ahmedabad around 10:30 AM and wife reached her circle office located near Nehru Bridge around 11:15 AM. What would have been ideally a 4 hour journey was a 7+ hour nightmare!

The return journey was much better in comparison. No blocks at any of the above mentioned locations. We took a chance and came via the Golden Bridge instead and we breezed through. Left Ahmedabad around 3 PM and reached Navsari around 8 PM including a 20 minute stopover at the Reliance food court in the expressway.

For those who are planning a trip to Ahmedabad and beyond from Pune, Mumbai, Surat, make it a point to go via the Golden Bridge at Bharuch instead of the NH-8 bypass. Do not take the NH-8 bypass and get stuck in the mess.

Looks like it used to be a favourite among a lot of travelers around that time.

But it's all history now. The bridge is complete towards both sides. Crossing this stretch is a breeze.

[rajivr1612]

Voted 6+ hrs.
I was traveling by bus in this ordeal.
I was staying in Dombivli, a suburb of Mumbai, if I can call that.
This was in 2010, wife and I decided to go Mahabaleshwar during the Ganesh Chathurthi holiday. This was our 1st wedding anniversary trip. We booked a bus from Thane. Boarding was supposed to be at 11pm and hopefully reach Mahabaleshwar at 6am. Bus started at 11.30pm. We settled and slept. Somewhere at night we were on the ghats standstill. And it continued all through the night. Don't recall the actual reason for the traffic jam. We finally reached our hotel at 3pm, missing out on the taxi tour of various points (part of the package) which was supposed to start at 10am. I had to again book a taxi separately for this tour.
We left behind the horrible travel experience and had a good time nevertheless for the rest of the day and next.
The return trip however was uneventful.
The tour operator as expected washed off his hands.

[narayans80]

In my personal driving, the longest I've spent in a traffic jam was 45 mins on Chakan-Talegaon road, a road I never did any research about and took on the spot, during my winter trip last year.

If you count time spent as a passenger. Then there are atleast 2 instances in Diwali eve traffic and accident mess on Trichy-Villupuram sector where I've spent like 5-7 hours in a bus:

1. First was 1988 Diwali eve when we started at 8pm from Madurai and we were stopped at the same spot near Villupuram from 2am till 10am at the same spot. We eventually were dropped at Saidapet at 1pm.

2. Second was similar, happened in 1998, this time was stuck between Ulundurpet and Thozhudur for 6 hrs and eventually reached at noon.

This was a regular affair on this stretch with a huge train of buses crossing each other dead of the night on a 2-lane stretch. The present day toll plaza lines hardly hold candle to the grid locks that used to happen every festive season on this stretch.

Another infamous stretch in TN is the Thoppur ghat which was again a 2-lane road and much steeper than what it is now.
--
Not really a stuck in traffic jam experience, one such festive day (I think Independence Day/Dussera 2008) we were unfortunate to have Bangalore rains, which means grid locks. In our case was extreme slow moving traffic from Double Road till Hudson Circle and then grid lock. This was at 1020pm and we had Bangalore Mail to catch at 1045pm. So we ran the rest of the way till SBC and reached at 1040 pm in time to catch our train

[arunphilip]

Voted 4-5 hours, in memory of a dreadful day in Bangalore, when returning from office during the monsoons. It took ~4 hours to move from the Museum Road/Residency Road junction, until Cox Town, a distance that normally takes barely 20-30 minutes at the same time of day.

Funnily enough, the part of the commute prior to this was normal, and didn't give any forewarning of the boredom that awaited us, and the part of the commute after this occurred around midnight, and the roads were as empty as a normal midnight.

What made the wait much better were a multitude of factors:

1. This was in the heart of the city, so no safety concerns
2. Car, kept us comfortable and sheltered from the elements
3. The company of a friend who carpooled with me often
4. Empty bladders for both of us
5. Snacks and beverages that were present in the car
6. A bit of fatalistic/helpless laughter at how bad things can get when a few drops of rain hit Bangalore!

[Samba]

The max for me was nearly 4 hours on the Vikramshila Setu at Bhagalpur on the Chat Puja day.

Actually i prefer to take a detour & spend 2 hours more behind the wheel of a moving car rather than being stuck for an hour in a traffic jam! Am quite paranoid about traffic jams. Whenever i see a long que, i stop the car beforehand or generally try to take an 'U' turn and find an alternative route.