I couldn't do all of this without relying on transportation. You'll hear a lot about traffic and crowds in Cairo. Cairo's renowned for having some of the worst traffic in any world city, largely due to its population explosion and lack of infrastructure that can deal with it. As I write this I'm on a bus to downtown that left AUC's New Campus at 5:15, and we're only getting close to Tahrir now at 6:45. (This trip normally takes 45 minutes.) Metro was so crowded I couldn't even push through the 5 feet that separated me from the exit in time, so I had to go to the next stop and come back.
Think for a moment about driving to school. You wake up, eat breakfast, get your stuff together and get in the car. You start the engine and enter the packed road, already full of commuters, as you prepare for what will be another busy day.
What we don't realize, though, is how much can go wrong on the road so quickly.
Last Tuesday, an AUC journalism student named Ammar Tareq was driving his Volkswagen on Road 90, the suburban highway leading to AUC, when he saw a huge pothole in the road. He swerved to avoid it, but instead his car flipped over. He had not been wearing a seatbelt, and was killed instantly. AUC's student union held a prayer service for him last week, and some 200 people attended.
This is not an isolated incident. Every year, at least 8,000 people are killed and 32,000 injured while driving on Egyptian roads. In early October, 12 people were killed and 8 severely injured when a car driven by a university student swerved to avoid being hit by a lorry truck and instead hit a crowd of pedestrians. The day that AUC students mourned Ammar's death, another student had an accident just a few kilometers from campus. He was fine, but his car had been crumpled like an empty candy wrapper.
I sometimes wonder if locating the campus so far away from the center of town makes commuting there less, not more, safe. Ask any Egyptian, and they will tell you that most accidents happen outside downtown Cairo, where traffic moves much faster, the roads can accommodate more cars, and people usually don't use their headlights.
Clearly, more people need to wear seatbelts. Who knows if Ammar would still be alive if he was wearing one? I think part of this has to do with students' feelings of entitlement and invincibility, but it's also part of living here. Plenty of people don't bother with these things that just delay them getting to their destination by a few seconds. You'd think in Egypt, where time is so much different from German or American conceptions of time, they could spare the extra second.
If you wonder why infrastructure development and safe practices are so difficult in Egypt, just go to downtown Cairo. The first time I visited there, my Egyptian friend Amr and I were crossing the chaotic Midan Tahrir, a huge square where about ten major streets intersect near one of the bridges over the Nile with eight lanes of traffic in each direction. One of the cops standing in the traffic circle was checking cars randomly to see if people had their seatbelts. Anyone caught without one just paid him 10 pounds ($3) and he let them go. This is partly the cop's fault for being corrupt, yes, but the small bribe and miniscule possibility of getting caught only reinforce these dangerous practices.
Corruption isn't always bad--as a tourist, a little baksheesh can get you out of unexpected sticky situations--but when you're playing with lives on the road, the tolerance for unsafe practices is outright reckless. The excuse that road safety and other infrastructures take time to build up is not acceptable. How many more university students' deaths will it take until this culture changes?
No comments:
Post a Comment