Driving in the streets of Jeddah is an art mastered by few. First of all, people here have their own traffic rules. Campaigns go unheeded, TV programs on the issue go unwatched, and people carry on breaking every traffic rule in the book.
Every day without fail I see cars with children in the front seats, either sitting next to the driver or, if they are toddlers or infants, in the laps of their driving daddies.
The worst scenario, also common by now, is fathers sitting holding their sons and teaching them how to operate the steering wheel, as if they were on a funfair ride. In other cases, children do sit in the back seat, but they like to look at everything around them, and so they dangle their heads out of the windows to watch other cars and pedestrians. This with the knowledge that these actions could be dangerous. Especially when most of us overlook or fail to use the safety features, like child locks etc., that are built in for our safe driving. In all these situation the people in the car look happy.
Now, such behavior would not be tolerated in any country in the world and is punishable by law, but since we are in Jeddah, it is OK to do what you want, and traffic police do not even bother to talk about the fact that children are supposed to sit buckled up in the back seat.
How many stories are there in the papers about car accidents involving children? We seem to have embraced the attitude that car accidents are fate and we cannot change it, so we might as well accept it. And fate it is, but God ordered us to treat our lives with care, not to endanger our own or other people’s lives in any way.
We always talk about how we have one of the highest, if not the highest, rate of traffic accidents in the world, and we are always shocked and grieve when people we know die or are wounded in accidents. But almost always grief and shock last a few hours and we go back to our old ways of carelessness.
All other traffic violations are treated as lightly. People cross the street at any point they want, and approaching cars have to wait — after all the street is for pedestrians first. Drivers switch lanes forcibly and overtake other cars without warning.
Motorbikes dance between lanes, adding more suspense to the scene. Going out has turned into a dangerous roller-coaster ride.
There pops up a question and it has to be asked: What do traffic police do? Basically nothing. Sometimes they are energetic and they start giving tickets to violators, but most of the time they are bored and cannot be bothered to look at simple violations — whatever deserves their attention has to be bigger than that; nothing less than a major car accident will do.
If there is a solution to that everyday problem, I am unaware of it. We have the law and we have powers to enforce it, but I don’t think we really care. Those who do are trampled under by the spirit of carelessness that affects many of our dealings these days.
