Running into traffic in a built-up neighbourhood in affluent north Tehran, Sina Mahdavi quickly loses patience. He accelerates, veers perilously close to the kerb to overtake a Peugeot 206, then zig-zags inside to whizz past another car in a hair-raising flash. The speedometer reads 80kph and seconds later we are bumper to bumper with another vehicle in front.
Mahdavi (26) a taxi driver of five years’ experience, rates himself a safe motorist. ”I might be fast inside Tehran but when I drive between cities I drive slowly,” he says while coaxing improbable hair-raising manoeuvres from his Kia Pride hatchback. ”It’s not a matter of fast or slow. I observe the rules, with mirrors and signals. I’m professional.”
Mahdavi and other ”professionals” account for the worst accident rate in the world. Last year nearly 28 000 people were killed in car crashes in Iran. Another 270 000 were injured. The statistics prompted a response this week from an alarmed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who normally reserves his pithier remarks for baiting the West.
The president is uniquely qualified to comment. Ahmadinejad has a PhD in traffic management. He has called for more stringent lessons and tougher policing on the roads. Better driving would cut traffic jams which, he said, caused Iran to spend two and a half times more on fuel than on education.
”The rate of accidents is below our nation’s dignity and should be reduced,” he told a traffic management conference in Tehran.”Many people are not familiar with the mechanism of a car and how it will react in certain situations. This matter should be taught to people.”
The president has his work cut out if Mahdavi is any gauge. His parents refuse to ride with him. Before family gatherings like weddings and funerals his cellphone buzzes with text messages from relatives begging him to drive safely on his way. He admits to more accidents, and fines, than he can count. Not all, he insists, were his fault.
Some of them must have been. In a 90-minute trip on Friday Mahdavi had several near misses — one a motorbike on which an elderly women wearing a chador and carrying a bouquet of flowers was riding pillion. He would pull on to the opposing lane, blithely ignoring double white lines and missing oncoming cars by centimetres, to overtake motorists moving with insufficient haste.
Such behaviour is de rigueur in the Darwinian world of Tehran traffic, whose first law is triumph of the quickest. Mahdavi is the product of a startlingly reckless driving culture where basic rules such as speed limits, right of way and braking distance go unheeded. Cutting up fellow drivers is a given, as is veering into the wrong lane with vehicles rushing head-on towards you. A motorists who misses a motorway turn-off will simply reverse back to it, against the hurtling traffic.
Mind-boggling traffic jams exacerbated by fast-rising car ownership, promoted in turn by cheap petrol, compound the situation. Slow-moving tailbacks, often involving multiple lines of vehicles cramming into two or three lanes, lead to impatient manoeuvres. Pedestrians add to the mayhem, ignoring walkways and bridges to cross six-lane highways between speeding cars.
The result is a permanent choking miasma of pollution in Tehran and other cities. Pulling into Valiasr Street from a busy roundabout, Mahdavi’s taxi is in one of seven lines of cars trying to squeeze into two lanes. Many are ancient Paykans, an outdated Hillman Hunter prototype that makes up 40% of the cars on Iran’s roads.
”There are too many cars and some of these ancient cars should be collected,” he complains. ”Ahmadinejad thinks Iranians aren’t good drivers but in such traffic people aren’t thinking about the rules or giving way to each other. They just want to get ahead.” – Guardian Unlimited Â