Endnote on Tehran: Driving

Tehran must be one of the most dangerous places in the world to drive. Other cities such as Moscow, Rome and Mexico City have great worldwide reputations for lunatic driving, but Tehrani driving is special. Tehranis drive to simulate sin. "We have some of the worst car accident statistics in the world", one English-speaking Tehrani told me, with evident pride.

For such an easygoing people, Tehranis certainly drive as though the world were coming to an end. On two-lane roads I regularly saw up to five cars next to one another at a stop sign. Or, a car would be speeding at 150km/hr in a narrow, two-lane road, but another car in the back might want to go faster and decide to overtake it by crossing into the other lane, even if a car coming from the opposite direction were only a few yards away. Or, in the hills just outside Tehran, even on a road with hairpin turns, without guardrails, and with just enough room for vehicles to navigate single-file in either direction, drivers don't hesitate to pass as many vehicles as possible and dodge oncoming traffic. Apparently Tehranis consider lane marks to be voluntary guidelines.

During the drive to the Alborz mountains for a camping trip earlier, our car got trapped in a hideous traffic jam on the road just outside Tehran. The focal point of this vexation was a roadblock at a T-shaped intersection formed by a small causeway perpendicular to the road we were plying. This causeway ascended a hill to one of the many cemetaries around Tehran for the Martyrs of the Revolution (the dead from the Iran-Iraq War). What the roadblock was for, we weren't sure. But two of Tehran's traffic police, normally ignored altogether by drivers, stood beside the obstruction and chatted amiably among themselves, without a care in the world, even for the cacophony of honks and horns and the chorus of Farsi cursing.

On either side of the intersection were two queues of cars facing each other on opposite lanes. Drivers in the back of the queues evidently grew tired of languishing there and eventually broke formation. Soon, our two-way road was transformed into a pair of one-way roads converging at loggerheads. Then the ruthless practicality of the Tehrani driver won the day: the first car in the queue opposite ours knocked over the road block and, unable to proceed forward on the road, simply swung around to the left (our right) and sped up the causeway. Without the slightest hesitation all the other cars in front followed the leader in a straggling, disorderly column and began blazing a trail through the cemetary. As the queue in front dwindled, we could see the impatient defile plowing its way through the martyrs' sanctum in the direction we had come from.

The sheer number of accidents and semi-accidents that I witnessed during my short stay in Iran is horrifying. While walking on the street, Jens and I saw a car dart through a street crowded on either sidewalk with strollers, careen suddenly and crash headlong into a lamp post. But before the crowd could gather around the site, the driver put the car into reverse, lurched forward and sped away as though nothing had happened.

Only a day later, during that same drive to the mountains, we saw two cars strewn about on the side of the road, totalled, crinkum-crankum hulks of metal and indeterminate innards. Behind these lay immobile two figures. One was fully covered in a sheet. The other, a young woman, was apparently still alive but bleeding profusely from God knows where. No one had bothered to remove her châdor; nor yet had an ambulance arrived in this remote mountain locale. But the curious part of the scene was that along with the normal traffic police were found on the site several members of the Basîj. What were they doing there, I asked the others. Jens's father, the driver on this expedition to the mountains, observed mordantly: "They're probably making sure the poor girl doesn't die in sin".

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