Day 4

Saturday, June 5, 2010 (Cairo, Egypt) – We celebrated Calvin’s birthday today, and while it was an exciting Harry Potter-themed scavenger hunt, extensive details are probably not necessary. If you would like to hear about Dumbledore’s challenges, I’m more than happy to go into detail. But for the rest of you, let’s talk about traffic.

On my first full day in Cairo, Darren asked Calvin (the 10-year-old) what the color of the stoplights in the United States mean. “Red means stop, yellow means yield and green means go,” Calvin said. Then Darren asked him what they mean in Egypt:

DK: What is green?
CK: That’s a pretty color for a light.
DK: Yellow?
CK: Hey, that’s the color of mango ice cream.
DK: Red?
CK: That light is the same color as roses. How nice.

Darren actually asked me if he had run any red lights because he doesn’t “even recognize them anymore.”

The streets are utter chaos, but from what I can tell, it seems to work. Some streets have lines painted, but there certainly aren’t any lanes, and I think a quick horn blast and a point signify the same thing as a turn signal in the U.S. Cars routinely get within 3-4 inches of each other while traveling at high speeds.

There are no posted speed limit signs that I’ve seen, intersections don’t have any lights or signs (and if they do they’re ignored), and one-way streets are clearly an optional concept.

Nobody slows down when entering a road, which means merging is pretty much making all the cars to the side move over. At night, most drivers leave their headlights off because “it saves gas.” Of course it does.

On top of all this, pedestrians are crossing the road in every spot except where crosswalks might be in other parts of the world. And they do it with a slow saunter, stopping in the middle from time to time to let cars bellow by. The contrast between the fast moving cars and the slow moving people is extraordinary.

Some women in full black burkas cross the street in the middle of the night. According to Darren, ninjas couldn’t find camouflage that was any better than these women. I haven’t seen them, but I have no doubt they’re out there as I write this, crossing some busy highway and confident that they’ll make it to the other side. No telling if that’s the other side of the street or something more metaphoric.

The thing is, it kind of seems to work. I’m not saying that the Egyptians are providing a monumental example of how we could fix our roadways, but there may be something to it.

In Colorado, there seem to be two rules of driving:

1. Never, ever and I mean NEVER let anyone into your lane under any circumstances. Perhaps he HAS been driving courteously and has had his blinker on for several miles, hoping to get off on one of a dozen exits since his actual exit, but this is MY lane and he has no right to barge into it.
2. If I need to exit or turn, I have EVERY right to point my car in the direction of where I have to go, regardless of where I might be on the road and how many cars, trucks or construction crews may be in the way.

I may be exaggerating, but that sure feels like it’s pretty much the way most drivers think.

Compare that to Cairo. Here, everyone lets people in because they have to, but at the same time neither car appears to slow down in doing so. In other words, both cars go where they want to in the most efficient time. Sure there’s a lot of honking and gestures (although I’ve yet to see the one-fingered salute here), but it’s fleeting. I don’t see anybody senselessly and maddeningly chasing down another car because they got cut off.

We could probably do develop some sort of system like this in the United States. All it would take is convincing every other American that a ding or two (or 33) in their cars was not a big deal.

I guess it won’t work after all.