Drive down Mumbai’s roads with a smile on your lips. City-based online platform Roads of Mumbai takes a dig at Mumbai’s traffic woes with quirky car stickers that have a unique take on how commuters can deal with traffic jams – with their sense of humour intact
_d.jpg "These car stickers about Mumbai will help calm your road rage")
Car stickers by Roads of Mumbai
Despite the pandemic, Mumbai traffic continued to worsen over the last year, what with roads being dug up for the Metro construction, leaving the city’s arteries clogged with traffic during peak hours.
In a bid to express, educate and yet find something to laugh about in the city, online platform Roads of Mumbai launched innovative car stickers earlier this week, to help Mumbaikars cope with traffic better. It did not take long for them to find multiple takers. From ‘Tolerance Level WEH Traffic’ to ‘Have Brains? Wear Helmets’ and even ‘We Are In This Together #MumbaiTraffic’, they are sure to make you laugh even during an exhausting few hours on the roads.
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Talking about the initiative, Roads of Mumbai’s founder, who chose to stay anonymous, explains, “The idea behind the car stickers was to bring a smile to the faces of regular commuters travelling by cars. Imagine paying lakhs of rupees to buy a car and then driving on the same roads filled with potholes, unbearable traffic jams, rising fuel costs, no space to park your car, and traffic violators driving dangerously.”
The creative media professional adds that facing such conditions on a daily basis can be frustrating, and the stickers are a medium to help express this road rage in a subtle yet funny way.
While there are other kinds of road safety stickers, these also feature those which focus on specific roadways, used by many in the city and thus become instantly relatable to all. “There are specific stickers for the most infamous roads such as WEH (Western Express Highway), EEH (Eastern Express Highway)and Shilphata Junction. Apart from these, some stickers have been made to discourage honking, and to remind motorists to follow road safety laws – all in a fun way,” says the founder.
However, while the stickers may strike everyone as pure humour, it is not all fun and games for Roads of Mumbai.
The platform, made live in 2016, was started with the aim to raise awareness about road safety, civic issues, the importance of public transport, footpaths and alternate modes of transport.
The founder reveals that it took a visit to Sri Lanka before starting the project, which ignited the idea that change was possible. Surprised to see how disciplined Lankans were on the road, the founder says: “It made me realise that if our neighbouring country can be so disciplined, why can’t we replicate their civic sense?"
Going by anecdotal evidence, Mumbai’s traffic seems to have increased during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“People who can afford personal cars and two-wheelers are avoiding public transport to reduce their chances of getting infected. This is adding more congestion on our roads. Over the last decade, the combined road length in Mumbai has remained unchanged at 2,000 km, but the density of cars has almost doubled – from 20.3 lakh to 40.2 lakh now. This leads to more congestion and frustration among commuters travelling by road every day. I hope when people read the lines on these stickers, they will bring a smile to their faces and cheer them up,” says the founder.
With such thought behind the stickers, it only makes us wonder whether the person who runs Roads of Mumbai as a passion project, spends a lot of time on the road – or is merely observant.
“I used to spend a lot of time on the road in pre-Covid-19 times, but I have been working from home since March 2020 due to the lockdown, and the situation has remained more or less the same. Mumbai had the second most congested traffic in the world out of 416 countries in 2020, according to the Tom Tom Traffic Index. So, the stickers are based on my personal observations of driving in Mumbai over the years.”
The Tom Tom Traffic Index is released by a Netherlands-based location technology provider Tom Tom International BV. They publish their traffic congestion insights annually and for 2020, they tracked the levels for 416 cities around the world.
With over 50,000 followers on Twitter, the initiative has been launched for everybody in the city. As of now, 219 people have already placed orders for the stickers through the emailer list put out in the teaser. Soon, purchasing the stickers will be open to all, as Roads of Mumbai is currently working on printing the stickers and developing the payment gateway for it. The stickers are priced at Rs 150 for a set of four.
This is only the start, because Roads of Mumbai plans to create many more such stickers to raise awareness about road safety and the innumerable delays in infrastructure projects in the city – all with a funny, sarcastic twist, of course.
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