Come on, that picture is more exception than the norm. I travelled by bus for years when I was in school and college. There are definitely people hanging near the doors but nowhere as close as to what you mentioned in the picture.
Though I have never seen the bent buses in Bangalore yet in the 5 years I have been here. That is not to say public buses are pleasant here - you still deal with being densely packed with other commuters of varying degree of hygiene.
I was in Delhi a long time back(9 years), and when I came to Chennai, the Delhi buses started to look pleasant in comparison. The only buses which ran on the route my college was on were skewed to the side owing to the hanging passengers. In Bangalore, at least the damn door closes and no one is falling to his death.
When I was in Delhi, I was a broke student and took buses most of the times. Some routes were quite pleasant. Some were outright hell. The one that runs between south Delhi and Najafgarh is packed(especially after 8 in the evening), and people are knowingly and unknowingly thrusting their crotches into each other.
You guys should come by the Mission district or China Town or Lower Haight ( here in San Francisco ) or take public transit (any of the BART stations - 16th, 24th, Civic Center or Glen Park).
The foulest stench of excrement anywhere.
Some blame the Hispanic population and some blame the Hmong and others blame the street urchins. But I never expected to smell anything so odious in a major metropolis in the U.S.
Well, you may be exaggerating, but I found my stay in SF similarly disorienting.
We were staying at 4th and Mission, surrounded by luxury stores and hotels. At night, though, it was like Dawn of the Dead, with street-zombies wandering around talking to themselves.
Sadly (to me), they were almost all black. In Toronto, the homeless have the decency to be fairly racially inclusive (with Native Americans somewhat over-represented).
I always just blamed the systemic paralysis of sf bay government caused by poor design of the intersection between public power and private power over the commons.
Every time I go to SF, I take the BART from SFO, and travel through many of those stations. It's nothing like what you allude to; it's also completely underused.
That picture is definitely o lot busier than average but in my experience the majority of urban buses were unpleasantly hot and crowded in India, particularly during the rush hour. I avoided using them if at all possible, and I generally really enjoyed most of the other forms of transport on offer there, especially the more dirty and dangerous ones.
I mean, the central point of the original comment was the stark contrast between rich and dirt-poor, who often sit side-by-side, and how we better hide these differences in Western nations.
I had just wanted to nitpick that the bus example is actually a very good one to highlight why "riding the bus" is not a bad indication of poverty, which I think we agree on!
None of this detracts from the fact that riding the subway during the summer is miserable for everyone, but isn't (in my mind, or in the parent's) quite the same as an Indian bus!
Its not that bad, I took public bus to school as a thirteen year old. It was as crowded as an MTA bus. Except there is no Air Conditioning, otherwise it is not that bad. Trains however tend to be much worse, since the doors never close.
Guess I was thinking more from a standpoint of the social status of taking public transport versus having your own car. But you're right, those considerations are irrelevant next to the aforementioned heat and overcrowding.
When I was growing up in Chennai I would lean out the bus doors (with one hand) primarily to impress the young hotties walking along the side of the road.
Imagine being crammed in during a 100-degree+ summer just to get to and from work every day. Oof.
I live in NYC; we have a very tame definition of "taking the bus" as compared to India.