in india, the biker is treated like the problem

this is the second piece in a series about how india keeps solving the wrong problem.

the first one was about roads in general. this one is narrower and more personal. it’s about the person on the two-wheeler.

if you ride here, you already know the feeling. you’re tolerated, not welcomed. fined, not protected. moved along, not designed for.

i want to lay out why that feeling is real. and why fixing it would mean admitting we’ve been aiming at the wrong target the whole time.

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the most common rider is the most likely to die

start with the number that should end every debate.

in 2024, around 84,599 two-wheeler riders died on indian roads. that’s close to half of all road deaths. add pedestrians and you’re at roughly two thirds of everyone killed.

for the distance they cover, riders die at many times the rate of people in cars. estimates vary, but it’s on the order of thirty times.

and the reason is brutally simple. you have no metal shell. no airbag. no crumple zone. a pothole a car shrugs off can flip you.

so logically, the most vulnerable road user should get the most protection. the most thought. the most careful design.

instead, the most vulnerable road user gets the least of all three.

that gap is the whole story. everything below is just the gap showing up in different places.

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treated as second class, even at the door

let’s start where it stings, because it reveals the mindset.

walk a bike up to a five star hotel and you’ll often be told it can’t go near the lobby. doesn’t matter if it’s a touring machine worth 8 to 25 lakh. you get sent to the two-wheeler lot. the one shared with the staff.

meanwhile the cars get valet at the entrance.

riders report it constantly. a touring bike turned away from the lobby of a heritage hotel. a royal enfield rider restricted at a hotel where he’d already booked a room.

some places run a flat no two-wheeler policy inside the premises.

and the tell is this. the same hotels happily park a porsche near the lobby. the bike isn’t a problem because it’s a bike. it’s a problem because it doesn’t signal the right kind of money.

cyclists get it worse. people on 2 to 5 lakh bicycles, treated like they wandered in by mistake.

you paid for the room. you’re still the guest they’d rather not see at the front.

this isn’t about parking. it’s about who the space is built to respect.

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banned in some places, harassed in the rest

the law adds its own version of the same message.

in november 2024 the delhi high court upheld the nhai ban on two-wheelers on access-controlled expressways. roads like the delhi-meerut expressway prohibit them outright.

the reason given is safety. but there’s no evidence-based policy that separates a small commuter bike from a high-capacity touring motorcycle. it’s one blunt line for every two-wheeler.

now the strange part. on some expressways, motorcycles are legally allowed and even charged toll. and riders there still report being stopped and turned back regardless.

so you’re either banned, or allowed but still waved off.

india is the largest two-wheeler market on earth. the policy still treats the motorcycle as something to be kept off the good roads.

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the violence we’ve quietly accepted

then there’s road rage, and how normal it has become to take it out on a rider.

near a gurugram toll, a group of eleven bikers out early on a sunday was chased by men in an suv. baseball bats came out. a kawasaki z900 worth around 10 lakh was smashed. it was half past seven in the morning.

and that’s just one that made the news. road rage cases against riders surface again and again, in city after city, often after the most minor collision, sometimes ending in hospital.

reported road rage in indian cities has been climbing year after year.

the reason bikers get targeted is brutally simple. no shell to hide behind. harder to fight back. often riding alone.

we’ve started treating violence against riders as a normal hazard of the road. it isn’t normal. we just stopped flinching.

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enforced unevenly, not where it counts

enforcement adds another layer, and it rarely lands where the real danger is.

helmet rules carry steep fines and licence suspension. fair enough on paper. the issue is how unevenly they land.

too often it falls on the easy, visible stop rather than the behaviour that actually causes crashes. and the system leaks at the other end too, with a large share of issued fines never actually collected.

so it can be heavy at the roadside and weak on outcomes. a lot of friction, and not much added safety.

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invisible in the way the road is built

step back from any single incident and look at the infrastructure. the bias is built into the concrete.

no bike lanes. you share the lane with trucks, autos, cars, and people walking. no bike boxes at junctions. no safe place to wait.

barely any dedicated two-wheeler parking, and park on a footpath and you’re fined or towed.

the road surface itself is a threat. potholes that a car barely registers. patches that go bad without warning. lane markings that fade out the moment you leave a metro. waterlogging after the lightest rain.

pothole-related crashes killed over 5,626 people between 2018 and 2020. national highways logged 59 major structural failures since 2019.

and on long rides, there’s no dignity in the gaps either. clean toilets are rare. most highway stops have no real facilities. the single most common complaint among riders isn’t speed or distance. it’s that there’s nowhere decent to stop.

you’re asked to share the most dangerous space, with the least protection, and the fewest places to rest.

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why it keeps happening

none of this is an accident of one bad official or one rude hotel. it’s a pattern, and patterns have causes.

the first is class. the bike is read as a marker of low status, even when it costs more than the car beside it. the discrimination is aimed at what the rider supposedly represents.

the second is car-centric planning. our cities are designed around the aspiration to own a car, not around the reality that most people are on two wheels. we plan for who we wish people were.

the third is the safety excuse. “safety” justifies the bans, but the policy never does the actual work of separating a commuter bike from a touring machine. it’s a reason, not a reason that was studied.

and the fourth is the quiet one. riders are a voting majority with almost no organised voice. nobody loses an election over how bikers are treated. so nobody fixes it.

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the wrong problem, again

here’s where this connects back to the series.

we have framed the biker as the problem to be managed. how do we keep them off this road. how do we fine them faster. how do we keep them away from the lobby.

every one of those is energy spent on removing the rider.

the real problem was sitting in the first statistic. the most common road user is the most likely to die, and we’ve built almost nothing to change that.

we keep asking how to get bikers out of the way. the question was always how to keep them alive.

protected lanes. road surfaces that account for two wheels. enforcement aimed at danger instead of easy targets. rest stops with basic dignity. policy that knows the difference between a scooter and a superbike.

none of it is exotic. it’s just unglamorous, and it serves people we’ve decided don’t have a voice.

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if you ride, you already knew this

i’m writing this partly to say something simple to anyone who rides here. the discomfort you feel isn’t in your head, and it isn’t you being dramatic. the system really is built this way. the numbers back you up.

so the next time a guard waves you toward the staff lot, or a sign tells you your road isn’t yours, notice what’s actually being solved. and who it’s being solved against.

if you’ve got a story from the saddle, or a place that handles this differently, send it to me. i’m collecting the wrong problems, and i’d rather hear yours than guess at it.

next in the series, i want to look at something off the road entirely. same pattern, different street.