A Record of Losing While Trying to Beat Chaos on Sinhagad Road

Every morning at 7:48, I have the same thought on Sinhagad Road. "Why did I take this route today?" The answer is obvious, of course. It was this route yesterday, and it will be this route tomorrow. But it took roughly four months of miserable experimentation to accept that fact.

The office is in Kothrud, and home is on the Worli side. In a straight line, it's laughably close. But in Pune, a straight line is basically a cruel joke by map app developers. In reality, you have to take Sinhagad Road and fight your way through rickshaws, every species of two-wheeler, and buses that flatly reject the very concept of lanes. One evening, after spending 25 minutes more than usual on my commute home, I opened a spreadsheet. As any self-respecting office administrator would. The column headers read: Date, Departure Time, Arrival Time, Route, Weather, Notes. That's where everything went wrong.

Experiment 1: "Just Leave Earlier"

The first thing I tried was moving up my departure time. I changed my 7:30 departure to 6:50. It worked for the first two days. The roads were relatively empty, and I arrived at the office before 8, enjoying the luxury of a cup of tea at a quiet desk. Two green cells filled up in the spreadsheet.

The trouble started on day three. To leave at 6:50, I had to wake up at 6:00, and to wake up at 6:00, I had to be asleep by 11 the night before. I am not a person who falls asleep at 11 PM. Once the YouTube algorithm starts recommending Marathi short films, 1 AM is a given. Within a week, sleep deprivation had turned me into a zombie at the office before lunch, and I accidentally sent an email meant for the accounting department to the entire staff. Trying to save 40 minutes nearly cost me my workplace credibility.

Moving up the time only makes sense when you're prepared to shift every other life habit along with it. I wasn't. Thinking I could just push the departure time forward and leave the rest of my life untouched was itself the mistake.

Experiment 2: The Illusion of Alternate Routes

As the spreadsheet started turning red, I decided to change the route itself. I tried three alternative routes suggested by Google Maps, rotating through each for a week. The route looping through Parvati, the narrow alley behind Law Garden, and the long way around via Karve Road.

The logic of the Parvati route was that the added distance would be offset by less congestion. In practice, it overlapped exactly with school drop-off times, and I got stuck in front of school zones every single day. I gave up on the alley behind Law Garden on day one, after seeing an auto-rickshaw driver barrelling toward me from the wrong direction. The alley is about one and a half cars wide, yet it's two-way. Designating something physically impossible as a road seems to be a speciality unique to Pune.

The Karve Road route was nearly twice the distance, yet surprisingly, on some days it was faster than Sinhagad Road. The problem was the qualifier "some days." On the remaining days it was slower, and fuel costs ran about 1,500 rupees extra per month. The moment I added a "Fuel Cost" column to the spreadsheet, I was effectively conceding defeat in this experiment.

The very idea of finding an alternate route was the problem. I had imagined I could discover a secret passage in a city where hundreds of thousands of people commute every day. If such a passage existed, hundreds of thousands would already be using it, and then it too would be jammed.

Experiment 3: The Adventure Known as Public Transit

I decided to give up my car and try the PMPML bus. Good for the environment, easy on fuel costs, and above all, freedom from the stress of driving. I installed the PMPML app and researched the routes. A 12-minute walk to the nearest stop, about 40 minutes on the bus, and an 8-minute walk from the stop to the office. Roughly one hour door to door. By car it averaged 35 minutes, so I'd be spending 25 extra minutes, but I convinced myself it wouldn't be bad since I could listen to podcasts or read.

First problem: the bus doesn't come on schedule. I expected this. What I didn't expect was the sheer range of deviation. Some days 5 minutes early, some days 20 minutes late. Waiting 20 minutes at a stop during rush hour means taking acrid exhaust fumes full in the face. Second problem: the density inside the bus. During commuting hours, the passengers aren't the people; it's the empty space between them. Arriving at the office with a wrinkled shirt meant spending the first 30 minutes fixing my appearance. When the office administrator shows up looking like he slept in his clothes, nobody says anything outright, but you can feel the stares.

The third problem was the final blow. If I missed the bus after work, I had to wait over 30 minutes for the next one, and it got dark in the meantime. Standing alone at a dim bus stop, the realisation washed over me: I'm putting myself through all this to save 1,500 rupees in fuel costs. After two weeks, I picked up my car keys again.

To use public transit as a complete replacement, you can't just wing it the way I did. You have to redesign your commuting hours around the bus schedule. I started without having secured that flexibility from my company, so it was doomed from the start.

A Last-Ditch Effort: The Timing Hack

With neither routes nor modes of transport working out, I pivoted to fine-tuning my departure timing. As the spreadsheet data accumulated, one pattern emerged. Departing between 7:40 and 7:55 AM meant Sinhagad Road congestion at its worst, while leaving after 8:10 improved things slightly. So I proposed to my boss that I'd push my arrival 15 minutes later in exchange for cutting my lunch break by 15 minutes.

My boss stared at me for a long moment and said, "Everyone else comes in at the same time." He was right. Me alone adopting a staggered schedule wouldn't change the rhythm of the entire organisation. As long as the morning meeting starts at 9, there was virtually no real difference whether I arrived at 8:45 or right at 9. The problem wasn't the traffic. It was my delusion that I could control it.

Over four months, the spreadsheet accumulated 87 rows, the result of combining 7 routes, 5 departure time variations, and 3 modes of transport. All that data told me exactly one thing: leaving on Sinhagad Road at 7:48 takes an average of 35 minutes, and no other combination meaningfully beats it.

I ended up back on the original route, at the original time. Only one thing changed. Before, I used to get frustrated sitting in traffic; now, I just turn on a podcast. What 87 experiments taught me wasn't a better route but a better attitude. A passage I'd read in a Stoic philosophy book finally clicked in the middle of my commute: don't spend energy on things you can't change. The congestion on Sinhagad Road went straight to the top of my list of things I cannot change.

The spreadsheet is still on Google Drive. I open it sometimes and it makes me laugh. That table of red and green cells is the most useless, and at the same time the most instructive, non-work document I've ever created.