Driving and parking

For seeing pandals in the old city, driving is worse than walking and much worse than the Metro. Roads around every major puja are closed or made one-way, parking is prohibited across whole neighbourhoods, and the last several hundred metres are on foot regardless of how you arrived.

The classic mistake is to drive from puja to puja. It produces an evening in which you see four pandals and three hours of stationary traffic.

In the eastern and northern belt — Salt Lake, Lake Town, Dum Dum Park, the V.I.P. Road corridor — where distances between clusters are genuinely long and the roads are wide. Outside the V.I.P. Road peak, a car here beats everything.

And for anyone who cannot walk far, where being dropped as close as the barricades allow is the difference between going and not going.

Park once, at the edge of the cluster you intend to walk, and leave it there for the evening. Do not try to reposition; you will not get the space back.

No-parking restrictions are extensive around the pandal areas during the five days and they are enforced with towing. Look for the police signage rather than for an empty kerb — an empty kerb near a big puja on Ashtami is empty for a reason.

The traffic plan, the closures and the parking restrictions are published by Kolkata Traffic Police shortly before the festival each year. Check that year's notification; it is the only reliable source and it changes annually.

The version that actually works: drive to the edge of a neighbourhood well before the evening peak, park legally, and stay there. Do the whole cluster on foot, eat there, and drive home after midnight when the roads have cleared.

Choose the parking spot for how easy it is to leave rather than how close it is to a pandal. A space on a through road two hundred metres out is worth more at one in the morning than one in a lane that will be barricaded.

After about one in the morning most of the city drives normally again, and this is when a car earns back some of the evening. It is also when people have been out for eight hours; if the evening involved anything to drink, it is a cab, and the police check for exactly this during the festival.

Watch for pedestrians everywhere, including where you would not expect them. During Pujo the road is a footpath and the assumption runs in that direction, not yours.