Warning: this posting contains some graphic detail of a traffic accident.
I was on my way to work the other morning when I got stuck behind a queue of traffic at a set of traffic lights. I could just see the front of the queue and, when the lights changed, I could see that only two or three cars went through the junction before the lights changed back again.
When I got to the front of the queue everything was explained. Two cars had had a minor accident and the drivers were sitting in their cars, blocking the traffic, waiting for the traffic police to arrive.
The traffic police insist on seeing the vehicles in exactly the position they were immediately after the accident. The most likely place for an accident is a busy junction so when an accident occurs the drivers have to leave their cars, typically in the middle of a junction, blocking all the traffic, until the traffic police arrive. The whole point of this rigmarole is so that the traffic police can assign blame for the accident and, thus, responsibility for who pays for the repairs.
Having been involved in a couple of minor accidents, I know what happens after the traffic police arrive. All those involved have their ids taken by the police and they have to follow the police car (if their vehicle is still drivable) down to the police station.
The Byzantine bureaucracy will then consume most of the rest of the day. Eventually, you will get the forms you need to get your car repaired. If you do not have this paperwork, many workshops will refuse to repair your car. Some back-street workshops, may agree to fix your car, but at a higher price.
The police make suprise visits to the garages and workshops and if they find that they are repairing a vehicle without the proper paperwork, they will get a heavy fine!
I’ve heard of someone who had a minor accident when they were on the way to an important appointment. Rather than call the traffic police, they left the scene of the accident and continued on their way. The following day, the people involved re-positioned their cars exactly as they had been after the accident and then called the police!
Shortly after I first came here, a British ex-pat advised me that if I saw a serious accident, I should continue driving and not stop. The reason for this, he explained, was that, in such a situation, the police would take everyone involved, including any witnesses, down to the police station and sort out who was to blame there.
If you were a westerner, you were, at that time, likely to be the only one who had car insurance. The police would quite probably blame you for the accident so that the family of someone killed in the accident could claim against your insurance.
Actually, it is not necessary for you to be responsible for the accident; if you are involved in a car accident in which someone is killed, even if it’s not your fault, you may still be liable to pay “blood money” to the family of the deceased. The following table shows the amount of blood money in different cases:-
- 100,000 riyals if the victim is a Muslim man
- 50,000 riyals if a Muslim woman
- 50,000 riyals if a Christian man
- 25,000 riyals if a Christian woman
- 6,666 riyals if a Hindu man
- 3,333 riyals if a Hindu woman.
(Can you imagine anything so discriminatory in the west!) Anyway the rule is, if you’re going to run someone down, try and make it a Hindu woman rather than a Muslim man!
Since then, the law has changed. All drivers are now required to have third party insurance; this is available from a number of insurance companies at a fixed annual price of about 100 riyals per person. When this law was first proposed, all the Muttawa (the religious police – a definite topic for a later posting) invaded the Ministry of Transport, complaining against it on the grounds that insurance was a type of gambling!
The real reason for their complaint, it is suspected, is that they all have very large families and this per driver insurance was going to cost them a lot of money.
Well, now that I’m on the subject of traffic, I should warn any potential visitor to The Magic Kingdom (as some ex-pats refer to
Almost every extended Saudi family has lost at least one member in car accident. One of my young Saudi colleagues told about one time when he heard that some of his friends has crashed their car. He went along to make fun of them, but the smile was wiped off his face when he found out that one of them had been killed in the accident.
(BTW Saudi humour is very “robust”; another Saudi colleague told me that if a Saudi plays a practical joke on you, you will probably end up in hospital!)
Some of the teenage girls who lived on a compound where I used to live, helped out at a local orphanage in their spare time. Almost all the children there had been orphaned by traffic accidents. (BTW, there were over 90 girls in this orphanage and only one boy. Families are apparently much more willing to look after orphaned boy relatives than girls.)
Part of the problem is the small minority (mainly Saudis) who drive like complete lunatics. You often see them weaving in and out of the traffic at high speed.
On the other hand, you have a number of drivers, usually from the Indian subcontinent who drive very slowly so as to reduce their fuel consumption (after all, every 10 riyals saved is over 100 rupees back home).
I once came upon the scene of an accident shortly after it had occurred; a speeding car driven by a Saudi had hit the back of a car containing five Indians, and had completely sheared off the rear of the car, including the boot and rear axle!
Most of the Saudi highways have no pedestrian crossings. That means that anyone who does not have a car (i.e. unskilled Asian workers) who have to cross a busy highway, take their lives in their hands.
Certain stretches of busy highways are particular blackspots for pedestrians being mown down by fast moving cars. A colleague of mine once came across such an accident; he told me that he had run over a severed arm! This is, I guess, the result of a car traveling at 120 kph hitting a human body.
A favorite vehicle here, especially for those with large families, is the Suburban. When my wife first saw one of them, she described it as a hearse with seats. Actually, it’s even bigger than a hearse. They come in two engine sizes: the standard 6.7 litre and the economy 5 litre!
For some reason, when you see an aged suburban on the road, it is invariably driven by a bearded Saudi with a small child on his lap. (Seat belts have only recently been made compulsory for drivers and front seat passengers - you should have seen the fuss when this law was introduced!).
Not only suburban drivers but many others drive with small children on their laps; some western ex-pats, with typical black humour, call them “Saudi airbags”.
abuTrevor
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