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I've grown up in Lebanon -- a third world country still recovering from a 15 year civil war(1975-1990). Traffic lights and rules are merely suggestions to peopl
by entropy_ 13y ago
I've grown up in Lebanon -- a third world country still recovering from a 15 year civil war(1975-1990). Traffic lights and rules are merely suggestions to people around here. If something is physically possible, like a car being able to fit in an pedestrian-only paved road or two cars being able to fit in a one-way street you can be sure that people will do it. It becomes an innate habit to always check both ways and never assume that a car will stop or slow down or that the driver has even seen you when you're crossing the road. It's not "you might get hit" if you don't, it's "you will get hit" if you don't. It's sad, but it's true.
As an anecdote, there's a road that ends in an entrance/exit to a freeway that I use pretty frequently when driving from my home to Beirut. Two years ago, because the fact that the road was a 2-way road(people could use it to leave the freeway as well as enter it) was causing a lot of traffic they changed it into a 1-way road you could only use to enter the freeway, you had to leave from an exit further down the line. This reduced traffic jams immensely. However, before that could happen they had to go through several iterations on how to enforce this. First, a simple traffic sign was tried, this was largely ignored. Then they placed plastic barriers(those triangular things that can be filled with sand or water). Every night somebody would stop, get out of their car and move them to pass and things went back to how they were before the next day. Now they've closed it off with concrete barriers. It's working, but occasionally, especially at night, somebody will stop after the entrance, then back up into it and then use it as an exit. I once almost rear-ended someone doing that while I was going onto the freeway.
- dhughes 13y agoI live in Canada in a small town with a fairly large (per capita) Lebanese population (Tweel, Haddad, Rashed, Jabour). We have bad drivers here but I am willing to bet we exported the behaviour to Lebanon not the other way around.
- tome 13y agoWhat do you mean "you exported the behaviour to Lebanon"? How?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ptaipale 13y agoThis might be something along the lines of "I inherited my bad behaviour from my father; my mother still has got hers."
- entropy_ 13y agoI highly doubt it. The behaviour has nothing to do with bad drivers, it's mostly because of lack of enforcement. The only thing you can get a fine for is speeding, and even then most speed traps are easy to spot. Otherwise, just do whatever the fuck you want and you won't get a fine. I'm serious, anything goes. I've seen people burn red lights right in front of police officers and get no reaction. Heck, I've seen police cars burn red lights(for no reason, sirens weren't on, they were driving pretty slow, they just felt like it). I have a friend who got rear-ended by a police car and then verbally abused for being an idiot by stopping at a red light at night. We didn't use to have speeding tickets a couple of year back. Then they started enforcing speed limits. Lo-and-behold people started paying attention and generally trying not to speed. But going the wrong way(even on a highway, I was once almost killed by a guy doing that because there was a traffic jam at the only exit and he didn't feel like waiting so he just U-turned and went the other way, but that's another story) will not get you fined. I'm pretty sure that if traffic rules were enforced properly then people wouldn't so easily ignore them. But we don't have the necessary amount of police to even do a significant fraction of what's needed.
- akgerber 13y agoThat sounds like New York City.
- dhughes 13y agoYou just described my town. A lot of ex-hockey goons are police, three cars go through the red light, people don't signal turns not even police, lines on the road are ignored, people park anywhere, tailgaters everywhere, cars without license plates, road crews make the roads stupid because they can't drive so how would they know a road is wrong and on and on. I feel your pain.
- graue 13y ago> I've seen people burn red lights right in front of police officers and get no reaction. Heck, I've seen police cars burn red lights(for no reason, sirens weren't on, they were driving pretty slow, they just felt like it). As another commenter says, I've seen both of these things happen in New York City (especially the second).
- tracker1 13y agoThey could put those one-way ("severe tire damage") spikes in the freeway entrance.. that would at least reduce the ods of it happening.
- JabavuAdams 13y agoMy Dad is often amazed at how pedestrians in Canada leave their own survival up to the whims of drivers. They'd be dead in the developing world.