Mayhem on Main Street

(Dec. 20) A word about the traffic here. Astounding. Beyond comprehension. There is simply no analog in the western world for this particular brand of hysteria. I grew up thinking that the mad dash urban traffic scenes of Paris and Rome were the benchmarks for madness -- where the rule of law evaporated in the no man’s land beyond the city’s sidewalks. What I didn’t know then was that these traffic models would be mere child’s play -- a stroll in the park -- compared to what southeast Asians engage in every day. To say the streets are crowded goes without saying, of course. The roads are blanketed by cars, trucks, buses, cyclists, and the ever-present scooters and motorcycles that soon take on the feel of swarming mosquitoes rather than machines. Scooters, often loaded with 3 or 4 people, dart among each other and between cars with a hair-raising optimism that their sudden movements will be injury-free. Helmets, though common, are hardly universal. Unhelmeted, small kids, in particular, who are sandwiched (indeed, seemingly suffocated) between parents, appear oblivious to the harm that I believe is not just apt to happen, but a dead on certainty. Cars, like the ones we traveled in, come up on the bumpers of these two-wheeled vehicles so damn closely that so often you can see what kinds of screws hold their license plates on -- and this is at cruising speeds. Add to this mix the suicidal brand of pedestrians who actually deign to enter this war zone and you have the dictionary definition of chaos.

The notion of lanes is not even paid lip service. Are you kidding me? I’m telling you, it’s a huge waste of paint. Sure, there is oncoming traffic. But, that gives no assurance whatsoever that the oncomers own their lane. They must share it with the cars and scooters that pass from the other lane, sometimes three abreast, in what I can only describe as a fiendish game of chicken. I am amazed as much as I have ever been that accidents are not just more frequent, but hellishly repetitive.

It is truly a video game on wheels, but I hesitate to learn in whose hands the controller rests.