Traffic, Kabul-style

As I have alluded to in previous posts, driving around Kabul is something of an experience. Normally I wouldn't subject you, dear readers, to a post about something as mundane as traffic, but as is proving to be the case quite often, Kabul is different from just about any other city in this regard. There's nothing mundane about driving around this town.

First of all, there are essentially none of the aids to drivers that we in the West are used to. There are no lines on the streets, even the paved ones. There are no street signs, and virtually no road signs (i.e. stop signs, yield signs, etc.). Maybe 30% of the roads are paved, and the roads that aren't paved are filled with large rocks and larger ditches. There are two traffic lights, neither of which works with any regularity. Police checkpoints ring the downtown area, forming what is hilariously labeled as the "Ring of Steel"--given the fact that the most a policeman will ever do at one of these checkpoints is ask you for your passport/ID, the Ring of Steel mostly serves to snarl traffic.

And then there are the drivers. Kabulis look down their noses at things like turn signals and side-view mirrors--actually, it would be an improvement if they looked down their nose at the latter, because maybe then they might actually see something in it. Turning two-lane roads (with "lane" being a relative term, given the lack of line markings) into four-lane clusterf*cks seems to be a local sport, as does incessant horn-blowing when said clusterf*ck prevents one from getting where one wants to go. Drivers often find themselves trying to squeeze between cars waiting to turn left and the often quite deep ditches that line most roads (and serve as anything from drainage to open sewers), with a remarkably high success rate.

Indeed, perhaps the most bizarre thing about this whole nightmare scenario is that people actually get where they need to go in one piece and reasonably effectively. Sure, there are no traffic lights, but I've been consistently surprised by how short my trips end up being, although I admit that most of the places I go aren't too far away to begin with. Afghans as a rule don't wear seat belts--it is sometimes considered an insult to the driver if you put on the seat belt, the theory being that it means you don't trust him--but very few people are killed in car accidents, at least in Kabul, because nobody ever gets their car moving fast enough to do any damage to the passengers in an accident.* And the complete lack of traffic rules means a concomitant lack of police oversight, so people have no compunctions about doing whatever they need to do to get around the latest traffic jam. It's certainly a spectacle, and I am immensely glad that I don't have to do the driving. But perhaps the traffic situation here can serve as something of an object lesson. I don't want to think about what would happen to traffic here if the government tried to force people to do things like stay in lanes, obey traffic lights, or use their horns less to decrease noise pollution. The current system isn't pretty, and it doesn't meet Western ideals of order and predictability. But, to channel James Scott from Seeing Like A State, I'm not sure that trying to completely overhaul the system wouldn't end up making things substantially worse.



*The Kabul-Jalalabad highway, usually called the Jalalabad Road, is an entirely different story. It is one of the deadliest roads in the world, wending its way along the side of a cliff face down a gorge in the Kabul River. As if the treacherous terrain weren't enough, it is also essentially the only way to get a truck from Pakistan to Kabul, which is perhaps the single most important import pathway for Afghanistan. I'm quite thankful that my work here is not going to take me to Jalalabad...