I realize the issue of road safety is the current craze in Jordan, but I feel the media and officials are taking it way too far, and in the wrong direction too.
Al Ghad published a report on road humps, which are so annoyingly common in Amman that drivers deliberately take alternative routes to avoid them. The report says that “citizens” value the humps and urge the municipality to increase their numbers (what citizens? can I punch them in the face?). It also says that the municipality does not install humps which are over 5cm in height, or which are unpainted or unrecognizable. That’s a glaring lie and everyone knows it — plenty of trick humps in Amman and other cities. The municipality is supposedly working on fixing the problematic humps which technically can ruin people’s cars and cause accidents themselves. I suggest they remove them entirely.
I also suggest authorities fix the streets and patch up the numerous random and invisible holes and mend the water drainage holes which lie about 5-10cm below street levels and make our cars dip in them and almost run into either the pavements or other cars trying to avoid them. I suggest the municipality award street building bids to reliable and professional contractors, instead of the random connected engineer who commands a sea of untrained Egyptian workers and then, surprise surprise, the tunnel or bridge chips after the first drops of rain it receives and the street dough cracks and peels. I suggest we stop the wasta tradition, starting with the municipality staff and engineers, and ending with driving coaches and testers, and then we won’t need road humps anymore.
Another piece of news was about the death of a four year old boy in an accident. The boy was run over by a car and passed away, and his father was pretty badly injured. Other similar stories were covered previously by all Jordanian newspapers in an almost press-release format over the past few months. While the tragedy of losing human life to recklessness is obvious, it’s very interesting to me to note that car accidents in years past never got the same attention they are getting now.
Previously, only when 5+ people died in a massive and horrorish accident did we read about that in the papers. Now, whenever an accident happens, it’s right there in the papers. This trend started with the death of Hikmat Qaddoura and the subsequent noise over the accident, including the march and the road safety campaign launched by his family and friends. At that time, I started noticing how the unprecedented buzz generated in the papers about this particular accident touched a sensitive nerve in many people who noted that since the deceased belonged to a wealthy family, his passing away got the kind of attention no road-killed kid from a less affluent family ever got. They argued that kids die every day in Rusaifa and Wihdat, and nobody bothers to publish anything about them.
I am guessing authorities received these notes and digested them well, and from then on, we read in the papers about some unwealthy, often disabled, commoner dying in a road accident. I remember not too long ago there was a story about a blind man’s son, or the blind man himself, passing away after being hit by a car. Today there was the story of the four year old boy, and the trend is obvious.
It’s absolutely fascinating how class differences affect people’s perception of issues. The common Jordanian was angered by the attention to the Qaddoura case on the basis that common kids never got the same attention. The Qaddoura case started things going with a march and an awareness campaign. Now suddenly the Amman municipality and road authorities care about road safety and the media bombard us with pictures of mothers crying over their deceased kids’ coffins. They also make us feel like we’re roaming killers instead of recognizing their faults and the faults within the system. The whole affair is disturbing for the following reasons:
1- Roads suck.
2- Drivers get their licenses a la wasta. No wonder they can’t drive.
3- Driving coaches make so many mistakes and illegal errors themselves when they don’t have their students with them. I see that every day.
4- Amman Municipality is capitalizing on the Qaddoura case and the subsequent attention to road safety to blame everything on us drivers. Again, patch the roads.
5- Sob rhetoric is lame and ineffectual.
6- Class differences will increasingly underscore people’s attitudes towards significant problems.
7- Road humps do not solve the problem. They create angry drivers and broken cars.
And that ends my rant about road safety in Jordan.
