Photo by Alf Gillman/Flickr

That’s apparently a road warning sign in Lagos, Nigeria, from an interesting post on traffic, and other things.

We were a slave to our first real traffic jam today. It wasn’t so much that it took us three hours to get somewhere. It was more that there was a T intersection in a major road that was packed with cars, and our taxi driver was trying to make a left, across traffic, while everyone else seemed to be attempting a left in all 360 degrees. There was a small divider that was meant to guide people coming and going along where the base of the T met the top, one side to keep people coming, one side for those going. That’s what became the circle of traffic snarl. And there we sat for probably a half hour, millimetering our way into the smallest crevices between cars, as motorcycles squeezed through in all directions, street hawkers offered prepaid cellphone cards, candies, wallets, DVDs, whatever as they weaved their way between every car. Drivers began yelling at other drivers. Everyone looked kind of mad about the whole thing. As our car finally pointed in the direction of the turn, that was when I noticed that someone in an SUV had decided to drive against traffic along the wrong side of the base of T, which made it almost impossible, somehow, for anyone to pass a car in any direction. The pieces had all fit perfectly together, and no one could move. Had I not been paying attention in the moments up to this, and just had this single moment to draw information from, it would have been impossible for me to actually gauge which direction any car should have been going, based on a traffic pattern. This was what total chaos actually looks like. And just when it couldn’t get any more intense, police officers appeared from the other side of cars in front of us, yelling, waving big machine guns in the air, angry at the snarled traffic. One in particular was shouting “these drivers, look how they drive!” There was a moment when I had to remind myself that a lot of yelling goes on in places like Nigeria that doesn’t necessarily mean anything worse is around the corner. Like the two men yelling viciously at each other next to the car earlier that day, as we waited our way through another jam on the highway—you could just tell that, no matter how much they yelled, there weren’t going to be punches. In America, this would have looked like punches were coming. So, as the police were yelling and waving their guns, I had to take a deep breath and convince myself this was just like that earlier shouting match. No worries, right? Right?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 8:36 am and is filed under Cars, Cities, Traffic Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.