“Me First!”

The mentality of the drivers in Pakistan is quite interesting. The norm for drivers is to care only about being first, getting to a destination without concern for other drivers around them. For the most part traffic sorts itself out, but it starts to become a problem when the “me first” mentality leads to clogged roads. Soon backed up traffic on one side of the road leads to backed up traffic on the other side of the road. This is because when a driver sees that their lane is backed up, but sees adequate space for their vehicle on the other side they will start driving on the wrong side of the street just to get through. However, usually traffic is backed up for a good reason. Perhaps an accident is blocking the intersection, or a train is crossing the road. So when the cars start to fill up the other side of the road it just causes a huge mess when the accident is cleaned up or the train passes. Gridlock becomes the norm in each one of these situations, as no one will be able to get through. It can take hours for traffic to sort itself out. Most of the time the drivers will get out of their vehicles and mosey about while they wait for the problem to solve its self.

            This happened to us as we were traveling from church a few Sundays ago in Hyderabad. We got stuck in traffic. Motorbikes soon filled in empty spaces. There were even donkey and horse carts trying to get through beside us because they saw some space. The reason there was a space was because there was a blockade. This did not hinder them. They tried to push through telling us to move over, which we could not do. An hour later the traffic jam had sorted itself out and we finally were able to move the few blocks that we were trying to go. I will not complain about traffic in Canada anymore.