Traffic

I will admit that three years of Asian traffic has desensitized me to those who choose to view traffic laws as suggestions. Driving in Taiwan almost mandates the violation of traffic laws; following the rules is at times more dangerous than ignoring them. The roads are chaotic, with scooters and bicycles weaving around the cars and ubiquitous blue trucks. Red lights mean "Look both ways before going." This is now so ingrained in me that I'm a little scared of driving in the United States, where you can count on people to stop at red lights and stay stopped.

So Turkish traffic is probably less of a shock to me than to my fellow compatriots who are used to orderly rural European traffic. My shock was more at the homogeneity of motorized vehicles on the street. As in America, streets here are dominated by cars, buses, trucks, and taxis. In nearly three weeks I have yet to see a bicycle. There are a few scooters, but they're mostly pizza deliverymen, and they weave in and around traffic like Taiwanese teenagers.

Still, the roads here are scary. Ankara drivers are in a hurry to get wherever they're going. I've kept my eyes peeled for speed limit marking along the road. Perhaps it's my inability to internalize space and distance, but it certainly seems to me that the signs are interpreted as "minimum speed." At any rate, the cars zip down the street, flying up and down Ankara's numerous steep hills with flagrant disregard for the people around them.

Lane markings are optional. A two-lane street is clearly wide enough to fit at least three-- four if they're small-- motorized vehicles. This makes the idea of "changing lanes" completely irrelevant. If you're already in two lanes simultaneously, that makes you free to choose one or the other any time you please. At a red light, cars will line up four abreast at the white line, engines revving and drivers eyeing each other suspiciously, each ready to zoom out the second the light turns green and claim the coveted goal of being five feet ahead of the next guy.

But the worst is the pedestrians. Automobiles are a relatively new phenomenon in Turkey; it's been perhaps ten years since cars became accessible to the middle class and started filling the streets. There are a good number of people, especially those of an older generation, wandering around Ankara who don't seem to have caught on to this. I've seen people pop out in front of traffic, seemingly oblivious to the speed of the cars. The cars are reluctant to slow down or stop for pedestrians not in a crosswalk, preferring to honk menacingly and speed up.

Last week I was on a bus, and three school girls ran out in front of us. The bus stopped literally less than a foot away from one girl. I don't know which was scarier: that the bus nearly ran over her or that she seemed completely unaware of the bus speeding toward her.

So far I've only seen one accident, or rather, the aftermath of an accident. It was stimulating enough that I'd prefer not to repeat the experience. Let's hope so.