Sunday, 26 September 2010

Daily average driving speed - interesting to see the variation!

Typically, when I drive Singapore-KL on the expressway, I get an average of around 100-110 kmph for the expressway part of the drive, while I drive at a steady 110-120 kmph for most of it. Thus, on a good expressway, the average is typically 10-20 kmph lower than the the speed we usually drive at - thanks to slowing down in between to allow slower trucks to overtake each other and driving through certain bottlenecks.

For our overall trip, we got a pur driving average speed of 58kmph, which excludes time spent on sight-seeing, food and petrol breaks, but does include traffic jams, city traffic and slower drive through hills and lesser roads. Clearly, given that it is so heavily dependent on the kind of road we got, it varied a lot from one day to the other. Here is the average driving speed that we experienced on a daily basis:


It did vary a lot, from a low of 33kmph in hills (Manali-Bilaspur) to a high of 82kmph in Rajasthan from Jaisalmer to Sri Ganganagar. Interestingly, the highest average speed was not in the golden quadrilateral, but along a great national highway all along the border with Pakistan which in some ways does explain the great average we got. This highway has very little traffic as it passes through the lesser habituated regions of Rajasthan. Further, given its proximity to the border, it is a strategic route for the army and therefore the highway is very well maintained. I clocked a constant 100-110kmph on this highway. The average speed could have been more if we had not seen around 200k-300k people walk for a religious meeting somewhere in Rajasthan (more on this in the daily blog section).

I will explain the rest of the driving routes in greater detail in another post that would summarize the roads we faced over the 18 day drive.

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