Traffic

There is an essential difference among countries, and I am not talking here about geography, history, language, culture, politics, or any of your usual factors! I am talking about differences in traffic in particular.

After driving, and being driven around, in a few dozen countries, I can almost categorise peoples by their driving habits. And despite your scowl about using stereotypes, I will try to argue this from a cultural point of view. Climate, history, and beliefs affect how peoples dress and interact; they surely affect how people drive.

I lived in Geneva for four years now, I have been as Switzernised as a Middle Eastern can be; Now, I am tight on rules, punctual to the millisecond, clean my desk to obsession, and hold votes with Rania on dinners. My Syrian side still lives in me though; the hotheaded, passionate, argumentative, slightly chaotic persona is ready to get out at the first call. Reconciling the two has been a hard job.

Les Genevois drive their cars with the same manners they live their lives, they signal on every turn even inside an empty parking lot, never exceed 50 kilometres an hour, and always stop for a pedestrian to cross even if they would miss their save-the-world-economy-and-get-even-richer meeting in their private bank.

Syrians will drive even faster if they weren’t in a hurry, try to kill a daring pedestrian who didn’t respect cars’ ultimate priority, never signal even if their lives depended on it, and break traffic rules as a national hobby. But why?

I have looked at driving in countries I have visited in my quest to answer this very question. I have found that Italians will park in unassigned places, French will drive fast if they know they wouldn’t be caught, Germans will drive even faster even if their cars cannot handle it, Indonesians will never look the other direction before they take a turn on their motorcycles, and Nigerians will use their mobile phones while driving even if they didn’t have much to say.

Without much quantitative evidence, it seems that the worse the socio-economic status of a country, the worse people drive its cars. Proving this might have to wait until Professor Rosling adds a driving quality indicator to his GapMinder. But this doesn’t account, I believe, for all the variations. This is a call for further research and opinions!

Syria has introduced much stricter traffic code recently, with higher fines and clearer rules. This, to my pleasure, has made traffic much slower on Damascus streets. So we conclude that fear of punishment improves driving quality. But then, the scene today on the streets of Damascus is still the same one that used to prevail a couple of years ago but in slow motion.

It might be that punishment, police, and fines are not enough. Things might need to be extended beyond that, into creating a culture of respecting rules and abiding by a social code. This will take a generation, maybe two, and will cost us much of our rebellious heritage, but it might be worth it.

I will struggle my way back home through the busy streets of Damascus, and imagine the day when a taxi driver will not try kill me when I do not clear his way really fast.

And here are your 500 words for today.