Chuck the JD: Blackouts Reported. Check Power Map.

India has some severe infrastructure problems. The first is electricity. We’re in a pretty nice neighborhood in a decent apartment complex, and the power still goes in and out here at least once a day. It’s out right now, even though the weather’s great. This usually only lasts 20 minutes or so, and has only once lasted more than an hour. At some point I’ll try to figure out why this happens. It could be an issue with power plants. It could be circuit breakers in the building. It could be the family of opossums living in the switching station. Some impacts of this: laptops are really popular, since battery backups for desktops don’t last very long. Nobody bothers setting the clock on the microwave or TV, since they reset daily. Everyone has a stash of candles ready. Here, they’re already spread around the apartment, waiting to be lit. Stores seem to continue to function during power outages, although I haven’t gone shopping during one yet (reminiscent of the time when the power was out at the Watseka Subway, and of the three employees, the only one who knew how to take out a calculator and find the taxes by hand was the mentally challenged guy). I’m sure I’ll find more interesting impacts of unreliable power supplies as this sojourn wears on.

The layout in this city is also a total disaster. London puts it to shame. I’ve always said every major city needs to burn to the ground at least once (London did this too early), and this place is in dire need of a reset button. Just look at it:

There’s no order to the streets. The streets aren’t physically labeled, either, making navigation impossible without resorting to [[Indian GPS]], since you can’t tell what street you’re on, even at major intersections. The buildings are numbered, but since most streets are so short, the numbering doesn’t do much, and it certainly isn’t as useful of a numbering system as used in the US. Rather, the numbers begin at 1 at one end of the street and continue to the other end. Navigation winds up being accomplished by neighborhood and landmarks. When I want to go home, I ask for “Koramangala, Sony World.” Apparently this Sony store at a busy intersection qualifies as a landmark, as every rickshaw driver so far has known exactly where it is.

In addition to the gridlessness, there are no real arterial streets. There are some highwayish stretches, but a trip across town involves weaving around many small streets. There are ring roads, Outer Ring Road, Inner Ring Road, and one other, but none of those are true highways, Rather, they’re just routes patched together from existing streets. My guess is that eminent domain isn’t very powerful here, and that it’s impossible to condemn enough property to construct a highway from scratch. So you just draw out a route and designate it as the highway, then you work on making all stretches of that route as fast as possible. If you look at this map of Outer Ring Road, you’ll see how it weaves all over the place: