March 29, 2014
The view from the back of a “tuk-tuk,” an auto rickshaw. The vehicle was manuevering through Phnom Penh’s main drag, which has only five traffic lights in 12 miles. DICK HAGERTY
Sitting and waiting for the red light to turn green must be one of the most aggravating moments in our daily lives. On a recent drive down McHenry, I counted 16 traffic signals in four miles – and I think I hit a red light on at least 10 of them.
Our traffic engineers seem so fascinated with the proliferation of red lights that you wonder if it’s a fetish or if they all own stock in traffic-light installation companies. More roundabouts and a few extra lanes at four-way stops would seem to be a much better solution than our present pattern of seemingly random mandatory stoppages of traffic flow.
My little town of Oakdale has eight traffic lights in the 2-mile trip across town on our main street. No one I know has ever crossed Oakdale without hitting at least a couple, and sometimes it seems like you hit every one of them.
One of the ironies of this phenomenon is that often while sitting at the red I am hearing that guy on the radio from the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District telling me to remember not to burn my pellet stove or light my fireplace to preserve the air quality. Can anything I am doing in that regard match the amount of air pollution we are sending up while we wait, en masse, for the next green light?
I just returned from spending two weeks in Cambodia working with some village development and mission projects. Some of that time was spent in the capital city, Phnom Penh, a bustling city of 2 million, half of them on the road at any given moment in a wide variety of vehicles. The transportation of choice is a wide array of motorized scooters and small motorcycles, but you see everything from bicycles to luxury SUVs tossed into the mix.
On my trip back to the airport, I rode in a “tuk-tuk” (a motorized rickshaw) for the 12-mile trip across the city. We took the main street all the way and I counted a total of five traffic signals in that entire journey. And yes, the only place where traffic was bogged down was at those five intersections.
The people in Phnom Penh have an uncanny ability to move, blend, dodge and dart around in moving traffic without the necessity of all our modern signalization. And it works!
Most major intersections have a roundabout, and there were easily 100 vehicles in each one, all moving and keeping up a steady pace. Stop signs are merely a suggestion, not a mandate.
We had one great moment where we were traveling across town at rush hour, and our driver decided the quickest way to our destination was to go down a major one-way street – the wrong way, of course. We made a mile in quick time. No one gestured. No fists were shaken. No one tried to run us off the road. It just worked.
The great puzzle for me is why this carefree system can work in a country with an average education of less than fourth grade, with no drivers ed classes and likely no driving tests for the few who bother to get a license? Meanwhile, we pour millions of dollars every year into more and more intersection lights, signals and traffic laws and enforcement and yet we sit and waste countless hours and gallons of gas on our modern streets.
Clearly, much of the difference is cultural. We Americans are, by nature, impatient; always in a hurry. And our typical drivers range from far too passive to maximum aggressive. Not so the Cambodians, who by their driving techniques display infinite patience and consideration for the others sharing the roads.
Can we changes? Not likely. But, it is still a clear example of “what might be” instead of “the way it is.”
Hagerty is an Oakdale real estate developer active in community nonprofits. Send comments or questions tocolumns@modbee.com.
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