Outer Ring Road

There is a road named the "Outer Ring Road" that makes its way most of the way around Bangalore. So, it probably isn't really a "ring", but it makes it most of the way around. There is another road named the "Inner Ring Road", which does not appear to come very close to actually forming a ring. Perhaps, someday they will form more complete rings. From what we have been told, Bangalore has grown so fast that the city planners have not bee able to keep up with planning and actually building new or expanded roads- or other infrastructure for that matter. While the Outer Ring road was probably intended to be more or less that, the reality is that an awful lot of offices and residences and shops, etc. lie well outside the outer road.
The parts of the Outer Ring road, on which we have ridden, are generally in good condition, but there are sections where construction is underway and there it is less pleasant to ride over the bumps or to be delayed. There are other factors that make this road less attractive than it could be. In the US it would be called a "divided highway" the traffic in each direction is divided by a fairly substantial "median". At least, mostly it is divided. One problem is that there are places where the median has been damaged or altered by frequent use so that vehicles often cross over from one side to the other to make a U- turn or left turn. Mostly it is motorbikes and pedestrians who do this, but there are many areas where cars, lorrys and big buses take advantage of the opportunity to cross over. It is, at least, a little dangerous and at best it slows down the flow of traffic. The road is marked with white lines indicating 3 lanes of traffic in each direction- so it is a substantial road. Of course, it often carries 4 or even 5 lanes of traffic in each direction because the lane markers are only regarded as a "suggestion". Actually, the left lane, which here would be the "slow vehicle lane" is used for many purposes like breakdown lane, bus stop, pedestrian lane, bicycle lane and vehicle maintenance lane. That lane also appears to be narrower than the other two - so maybe the designers understood how it would actually be used.
There are "service roads" on each side of many parts of the Outer Ring road. These are 1- 2 lanes wide and meant to carry traffic in both direction to places where they can either cross the ring road or enter the ring road. Many drivers find that they can drive faster on the service road than they can on the ring road, so traffic can be heavy there. Most of the places it is really 1 lane, but they manage to get vehicles to pass eachother anyway. At the traffic lights the vehicles can sit for a fairly long time waiting for the lights to change or for the traffic police to wave them on. This is true for the ring road traffic as well as the service road traffic.
One thing that seems most confusing about the Ring road traffic is the wide variety of vehicles that travel on it. At any time it is quite likely that you will see any or all of the following ON the road itself: pedestrians, bicycles, maintenance people on foot, people with pushcarts, motorbikes (always), ox carts, horse carts, 3 wheeled vehicles, small cars, large cars, tractors pulling heavy loads, small trucks or lorrys, big trucks, tractor- trailer trucks, small buses, big buses and COWS! (There are probably others too!)
Just yesterday we were driving along the Ring road and traffic slowed rather suddenly at a place where a flyover takes 1-2 lanes of traffic off of the road and into the city center. In the right lane (what we would think of as the "fast lane" was a cow. She was just standing there- no food or water, just standing. In the road just left of the cow were two very large (and improperly loaded) tractor trailer trucks moving slowly (they were in the "fast lane" moving slowly and had to move left to avoid hitting the cow). Left of the big trucks were two smaller trucks moving slowly and to the left of them was a tractor pulling a wagon full of construction debris also moving slowly. Thus, on a road that is a little over 2.5 lanes wide we had 3.5 lanes of "traffic" either moving slowly or standing still wondering what all the fuss was about (the cow)! Of course, as is nearly always the case here, everything works out just fine. The traffic moved on, the cow was probably picked up by her owner later and taken to give milk and no one (except us) thought any more about the whole thing!