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Motoring in modern Cairo?
You'll need an armored car!
of TheColumnists.com
CAIRO, EGYPT
Bear in mind, first of all, that the Egyptians constructed architectural wonders, devised a written language, dreamed up a complex theology and had a formal system of government while western Europeans were looking for the comfiest caves in which to gnaw on animal bones.
With the above giving perspective, come now to contemplate with a recent visitor the traffic in today’s Cairo.
There are 17 million people living in Cairo. An additional one million people commute into the city every work day and then strike out for home after work.
The result is vehicular rugby without the genteel attitude. Rugby has a few rules. There are no rules on the streets of Cairo. There are no traffic lanes on major streets, for instance. You drive where the spirit moves you. It’s a sort of broken-field running played with battered Peugeots.
I spotted maybe three traffic lights during the five days I spent in the city. Not that traffic lights and lanes would have made the slightest difference in anyone’s behavior. You are expected to use your ingenuity and initiative to make your way down the boulevard. If you see an opening ahead that gives you a combined total of three inches of clearance from surrounding cars, go for it. Your adversaries--the surrounding drivers--will adjust. Quickly.
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looks so peaceful and green. This photo was taken after the bodies and auto wreckage were cleared from all public streets. |
It isn’t a matter of getting the better of the other fellow. It is a matter of wishing to go to a certain spot on the road. Fellow motorists are obstacles to your progress.
It is considered courteous to honk. You honk when you are passing another car, just to let the driver know you’re there. You honk if you are delayed for a fraction of a second when someone up ahead swerves across the road clogged with automobiles to say hello to a friend spotted on the far sidewalk. You honk out of sheer exuberance.
Perhaps the weirdest thing about Egyptian drivers is their reluctance to use headlights at night. There are four schools of thought about headlights:
Both headlights on when
it gets dark. (Rare)
One headlight on.
Both parking lights on, but nothing else.
No headlights on at all.
About one in four drivers refuses to turn on headlights, ever. As best I can make out, the idea is to save wear and tear on the bulbs. And anyway, the street is illuminated, so who needs headlights?
But at the same time, some taxi drivers
spare nothing in illuminating the incredibly shabby interiors
of their cabs with ghostly blue-white lights and even little
displays of lights that do fancy tricks like going up and down
and in circles.
Crossing a street in Cairo is…let me think of the word.
Okay, I have it. Terrifying. It’s terrifying. Imagine trying
to cross a California freeway during rush hour, then double the
number of cars. Add to that drivers who believe they are the
cat and you are the mouse, and it’s time to play.
The natives nonetheless cross streets with amazing insouciance. A tourist who absolutely has to cross the street learns to attach himself to a Cairene, figuring he knows all the maneuvers. You match your moves to his. Kind of like Fred and Ginger, except I don’t recall Fred mumbling the 23rd Psalm to himself. Walk out together into the traffic, pause together to let the cars rush by, see an opening, walk, pause together, see another opening, walk, pause, and so on to the far shore. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …
It’s worse at night. Remember all those cars with no headlights.
If someone were to somehow attempt to impose order on the chaos that is Cairo traffic --installing more traffic lights, painting traffic lanes and setting out rudimentary rules of the road, for starters--he probably would be put into a weighted sack and tossed into the Nile at midnight. Cairo drivers look upon chaos as a matter of civil rights. What do you mean I HAVE to use directional signals? Directional signals are for wimps. I can’t make a right turn from the middle of the street across three lines of cars? You’re infringing on my rights. Down with repression!
It’s all quite a different scene for Westerners used to relatively Teutonic order in urban driving. To a visitor wondering how he’d hold up in real combat, crossing the street in Cairo is a quick way to find out.
©2008 by Charles M. McFadden. The McFadden caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The aerial photo of Cairo is courtesy of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. The photo of a Cairo taxicab is courtesy of the online magazine Tour Egypt Monthly. This column first posted April 21, 2008.
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