As I mentioned last week, we drove from Cincinnati to Milford to return home from our vacation.

Why do I mention this again? Not for pity. (No, no. We’ve done many of these long, day-long drives over the last couple decades.) I like a good trip.

Rather, compare how long it took for us to make this 866-or-so mile journey compared to, say, a typical 1,340 mile truck trip between Mumbai and Kolkata in India that I read about somewhere outside Albany.

We left Cinci at 7:30 AM arriving home around 11:00 PM — including an hour delay through Buffalo, New York, because of a really bad tractor-trailer accident. Total time: fifteen and a half hours, for an average of 56 mph.

The Economist tells the subcontinental story better than I could . . . since, you know, they actually have facts and research.

TO ILLUSTRATE the effect of the shortcomings of both “hard” and “soft” infrastructure on Indian business, Vineet Agarwal, of the Transport Corporation of India, a freight firm, describes the 2,150km (1,340-mile) journey of a typical cargo between two of India’s great “metros”, Kolkata and Mumbai.

The lorry is loaded at 2pm in central Kolkata. But it cannot leave until after 10pm, because heavy vehicles can use the city streets only at certain times. By then, there is a jam and it is 4am before the lorry hits the National Highway 6. It takes a good 14 hours to travel the 180km to the border of this state, West Bengal, with Jharkhand. By then the border is closed for the night.

At 5am the following morning, the lorry joins the border queue. It takes two hours for the documents to be cleared, and the same time again to cross a sliver of Jharkhand. After another two-hour queue, it enters Orissa and enjoys a relatively uneventful 200km. But then it has to stop for the night, because the road is closed to avoid the danger of attacks by bandits or Maoist insurgents.

Day four begins again at 5am, and after 12 hours on the road the lorry reaches the next border, with Chhattisgarh. Here it queues for four hours, but at least it can cross at night, making a creditable 350km in one day. So by day five, the lorry is in Maharashtra, the state of which Mumbai is the capital.

However, the lorry still has to pass a further 12 toll booths and inspection points after the 14 it has already negotiated, so it takes another two days to get to Mumbai itself. The driver then has to telephone the octroi agent and get this tax processed, which takes all night. It is the morning of day eight before he reaches his customer in Mumbai, having achieved an average speed of 11km per hour and spent 32 hours waiting at tollbooths and checkpoints.

11 km/h!! (That’s almost 7 mph for the metrically challenged.) No wonder Indian truck drivers have so much . . . um . . . time on their hands.