Instructions: attach a thick strip of rubber
all the way around your car at thigh height, buckle your seat belt, and try not
to worry.
That’s all you really need to know about driving in Beirut. When you first come
here and see the way they drive you may be tempted to buy a Brinks armoured van
for the family car or, as an even more attractive alternative, to simply stay
at home until it’s time to leave the country.
“I can’t possibly go out there,” you may whimper, looking at a traffic
roundabout where the world’s longest-running game of chicken is being played
out under the insouciant hands of Lebanese drivers. As you watch, the cars
converge on the roundabout from four directions, each one rushing recklessly
toward the vehicle-clogged epicenter as though alone on the road. To your
disbelieving eyes, no car smashes into another. But how do they do it, when no
one appears to yield to anyone else?
Well, there is a sort of system, you just might not realize it at first. Before
I tell you about it, however, I must stress that it is only a sort of system
and that any motorist at any time may flout the rules.
The system boils down to one word: bravado. In almost any situation, right of
way is given to the boldest driver. At a roundabout, for example, the speed at
which you approach the intersection indicates your willingness to pulverize
anybody in your way, and the drivers already in the roundabout will note this.
During the next few seconds they will make a further assessment of your manner,
and based on that will make a decision either to apply their brakes and let you
go in front of them, or, if you have shown hesitancy, to continue moving into
your path, forcing you to hit your own brakes.
It sounds like a ridiculous system and it assuredly is, but that is how it
works. There are as many fender-benders as you would roughly guess, knowing
what you know so far. The reason there aren’t many more serious accidents in
Beirut is that there aren’t a lot of opportunities to drive at high speed.
Nevertheless people do try their very best to crash into walls and plunge over
the cliffs at Raouche and mow down pedestrians, but the crushing density of
cars on the road limits their chances. Driving outside Beirut is another story
and I’ve touched on that in other blog posts. I titled this post ‘Driving in
Beirut’ for a good reason. Once you venture beyond the protective congestion of
the city streets you enter another stratum altogether. I would never advise
anyone setting out on Lebanon’s highways not to worry.
The bravado system functions less well in the little one-way streets which make
up most of the city’s road-miles. Because of the permanent scarcity of parking
spots, there are always vehicles double-parked, leaving barely enough room for
one car to go down the street. Since Lebanese drivers don’t trouble themselves
about pesky one-way street rules too much, there are always cars going in both
directions on these tiny roads. Two such cars meeting head-on can’t begin to
get past one another unless they’re lucky enough to meet where an open driveway
has left a gap in the line of parked cars. Then one driver can carefully inch
into the gap, letting the other by. If there is no gap, one of the cars simply
has to back up, either to the end of the street or to the closest gap. And who
should be the one to back up? It ought to be the one without the legal right of
way, but it isn’t always. Bravado features in these situations, too, and if
someone is aggressive enough, a meeker driver might decide to backtrack even
though he is in the right.
I get behind the wheel myself now and again in Beirut but it’s generally just
to sit there with the motor off while I make engine sounds and pretend I’m
overtaking Fernando Alonso around the last turn at Monte Carlo. I’m kidding, I
don’t do that. Not anymore, anyway. What I mean to say is that I do drive
occasionally in Beirut and it’s the tiny streets that terrify me. I can rip
along the main roads with a weird, adrenalin-fuelled kind of confidence, but
I’m no good at judging how much space there is beyond the burly shoulders of
our SUV so I’m worried about scratching it in narrow places. I have to rely on
the helpfulness of the men who stand around shop fronts at all hours of the day
on every street in Beirut. They always step over to signal me through a tricky
spot and never laugh at my ineptitude.
M is an expert at gauging how much clearance he has on either side of the car
at any time. Many years ago in Calgary, when I’d only known him a short time,
we were driving in Kensington and decided to take a short-cut through a back
alley. It is an old part of the city and the alley was quite narrow, with
vehicles and rubbish bins dotted along the sides. M shot through that alley at
about thirty miles an hour with no more than an inch or two to spare on either
side of the car, but he didn't do it to show off. Indeed, he didn’t seem to
realize that there was anything remarkable in it. He drove as he always did,
with one hand lightly cupping the wheel, elbow on the armrest. He might have
been steering the May Queen float down Main Street in the annual Sundre parade.
The first time I came to Lebanon I quickly saw that most young people drove
more or less the same way M did. My father-in-law was a steadier sort though,
and I felt relatively safe when he drove me around. Their family car at the
time was a skin-pink Mercedes which they called The Sow. It was, I think, only
my second day in the country when M’s parents decided to take me on a little
driving tour of Beirut in The Sow.
At some point in the afternoon M’s dad, for reasons best known to himself, left
the main road and started climbing slowly up steep, tiny streets towards the
top of a hill. The street switch-backed and seemed to grow narrower with each
turn. Since the traffic was two-way I couldn’t see how the cars could keep
managing to get by one another if the road continued to shrink. It did, and
they didn’t.
The moment came when the road became so narrow that drivers pulled their side
mirrors in and inched past one another with shouts of guidance from bystanders.
We, too, folded in The Sow’s side mirror and crept our way past cars going in
the opposite direction, close enough to count their occupants' moles and slowly
enough for me to feel like rolling down my window and saying, “It was nice to
meet you, call me sometime,” when we finally nudged past them.
Then one car didn’t get past. As they nosed with painful slowness past one
another The Sow and the other vehicle made contact. A metallic groaning sound
came up from our girl’s stricken flank but my father-in-law didn’t stop
driving. He didn’t even change expression or turn his head to look at the other
driver. Both drivers simply kept creeping forward while we, the passengers,
stared wide-eyed into each others’ faces through two sets of window glass. The
horrible grinding noise seemed to go on for a long time. Finally they managed
to open an inch of room between the two cars and the sound abruptly stopped. I
let out my breath in a huge sigh of relief but my father-in-law, if he felt any
relief himself, revealed nothing. He simply kept going. The other car kept
going, too. I watched the backs of the occupants’ heads as the car slowly moved
away but no one turned around and soon they were lost from sight in the long
line of cars. Nobody in our car commented on the incident then or at any time
afterwards.
Kassem is a skilled close-space driver, too, but for all that our car comes
home with a new dent in it about once a week, so he’s certainly hitting
something on a regular basis. His real Achilles’ heel seems to be the wide
wheelbase of our car because he routinely overestimates the tire’s distance
from curbs (which are of the sharp-edged design here) and bounces violently off
them while travelling at speed, causing wheel and rim damage and hopefully
nothing worse. If I am with him at such a time he’ll dart an anxious glance at
me out of the corner of the eye as my head is thrown sideways and bobbles back
to its upright position, and then go on driving wordlessly as if nothing has
happened.
What with one thing and another, you’ll appreciate that we don’t rush to the
phone to make an appointment at the body shop every time our car gets a
scratch. We let the gouges and dents accumulate for a while before sending the
car in for a full facial. Last week I mentioned to M that I could see some rust
starting in the deepest of the current scratches – a strange, clawed-out kind
of gouge under the edge of the rear passenger door which Kassem couldn’t
explain – so we called the garage and made an appointment.
Yesterday morning the shop called to say the car was done and we dispatched
Kassem to go pick it up. He brought the gloriously refurbished automobile back
to the house and left straight away again with Dude, who needed to get to the
skate park to meet a friend.
A few hours later, As Kassem and Dude were on their way home and crossing a
large intersection just a few blocks from our house, a young man on a moped
carrying a delivery backpack from Roadster Diner collided with them.
The young man wasn’t badly hurt. Apparently he had misjudged Kassem’s speed and
thought he had time to cut in front of the car but, seeing at the last moment
that he hadn’t, yanked on his brake and wrenched his handlebars so that he slid
sideways into our front passenger door. It was enough of an impact for the end
of his handlebar to leave a large dent in our car but the young man didn’t even
drop his bike. Undoubtedly used to this sort of thing, he brushed himself off,
got back on his moped and sped away. Somewhere, there were people waiting for their
hamburgers and if he hurried he might still get a good tip.