MADINAH, 13 March 2006 — If you want to be an unlicensed long-distance chauffeur, Mufreh has one piece of advice for you: Disconnect your speedometer.
“If passengers were to see the speed I was driving, they would ask me to slow down. That would cut the number of trips that I can make from Jeddah to Madinah, which means cutting my revenue in half,” said Mufreh, 30, an unemployed Saudi who, for obvious reasons, did not want to be identified by his real name.
Mufreh has discovered a niche, albeit an illegal one, of running the gauntlet between Madinah and Jeddah at top speed. He has learned at least two things about his trade: Where to slow down in order to avoid speed traps, and don’t let your wary passengers know how fast he’s driving.
One of these wary passengers, Ibraheem Marzooq, described his experience using Mufreh’s clandestine service to get to Jeddah for a 5 p.m. doctor’s appointment. He went to the bus station at 9:30 a.m. searching for a car to take him to Jeddah. It was there that Marzooq met Mufreh.
Marzooq got into the car along with three other passengers. Things started out smoothly; Mufreh drove normally — or at least as normally as one can expect in Saudi Arabia. But after Mufreh passed the checkpoint leaving Madinah, his gas-pedal foot got very heavy. By 10 a.m. the car was rocketing down the highway at over 200 kilometers per hour. Marzooq estimated the speed not based on the “broken” speedometer, but by the oil pressure gauge, which was clearly in the red.
Marzooq felt compelled to fasten his seatbelt. He said he also began reciting verses from the Holy Qur’an, thinking that it might be his last day on earth if the driver lost control of the car or a tire exploded. At every suspected speed trap, the driver eased up on the gas pedal. Still, he was pulled over.
The highway patrol policeman asked for everybody’s identification cards. One of the passengers turned out to be an undocumented migrant and was arrested. The ruckus over the overstayer overshadowed Mufreh’s lack of a chauffeur’s license. Not only did he not get arrested for illegally shuttling passengers, he wasn’t even ticketed for speeding. After the incident, the car rocketed on to its destination.
At about noon, the vehicle arrived in Dahban, about 50 kilometers north of Jeddah. Mufreh said he had been illegally shuttling passengers for four years, and bragged about knowing back routes and the location of popular speed traps.
At 120 kilometers an hour, a trip between Jeddah and Madinah takes about four-and-a-half hours. Mufreh makes the trip in a little over half the time — most of which will likely be spent by his passengers clutching the armrest, reciting verses from the Holy Qur’an.
