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Driving in the Cradle of Civilization

An excellent BBC dispatch from Iraq notes the return of traffic police to the capital. I liked these lines, which describe the capital after the US-led invasion:

Traffic signals and direction signs became museum pieces, fragments of a dead language.

You might see a 13-year-old boy driving a pick-up at high speed in the wrong lane, or a driver stopping his car in the middle of the road to chat to a friend.

Or you might pull over at the sound of an ambulance siren, only to find that someone had rigged one to a donkey cart. Of course, senior officials travelled in convoys at top speed in the wrong direction - and would be followed by a trail of madcap drivers trying to keep open this temporary gap in the congestion.

Baghdad has no parking restrictions. You could just pull up your car wherever you like. Something the car bombers used to good effect - you could drive right up to your target and no-one would stop you.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 7:21 am and is filed under Etc.. 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.

2 Responses to “Driving in the Cradle of Civilization”

  1. Joshua Says:
    March 5th, 2009 at 8:29 am

    It’s interesting to compare everyday driving in Baghdad, with no signs or signals, rules or restrictions, to the situation in Manhattan you mention above — when the traffic signal at a major intersection went out.

    The Manhattan drivers felt that they should replicate the orderly traffic system that the signal was intended to enforce. But the preexisting system of signals, imperfect as it is in practice, is a necessary step in acculturating drivers to proper behavior.

  2. Jack Says:
    March 5th, 2009 at 11:43 am

    The picture of cars stuck in traffic is what our capital markets look like in Bailout Nation. Lot of capital and equipment, all declining in value when they don’t work, Mission Accomplished.

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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