Cambodian Traffic Police Flee Mob
Police were forced to flee an angry mob recently after a teenage passenger fell off of a motorbike and sustained minor injuries. According to the mob he was pulled off by the police.
The cops, in contrast, say he fell off because he was reckless in trying to avoid being stopped for going the wrong way. There are two important and opposing dynamics happening here. For one, the public at large think the police only stop drivers to collect money. This may be in part because vehicle stops seem to be so arbitrary.
The police sit back and let ten people breaking the traffic rules go by then jump out and try to nail one. They are inconsistent in their enforcement of the rules, in stopping scofflaws. This has caused a general disrespect by the citizenry that feels it has nothing to lose by trying to evade being stopped. They are also inept in controlling traffic; this is partly because so many drivers ignore their signals to stop. For the police, they must feel overwhelmed by a situation in which obeying traffic rules is voluntary and where they feel so little respect that drivers routinely snub their noses at them. I’m sure it also makes a difference that they earn only $30 per month and, to survive, feel they need to levy informal taxes on whoever they manage to pull over.
In this case I feel police ineptitude is preferable to police abuse, which is common in many places today, including the US. I’ve seen Khmers react with local police in a way that would’ve gotten them busted skulls in a second in America. However, lack of traffic enforcement still leads to frequent traffic jams and the region’s worst traffic accident rate. Do drivers routinely flout traffic rules because they don’t care, or do they simply not know them? In some cases, of course, there can be no doubt: everybody knows what a red light means, especially since most people are now stopping. But do they also understand that it’s not okay for a dozen vehicles to go through the intersection after the light has turned red?
This practice is becoming a recipe for gridlock since they will often go through the light even when the way ahead is blocked and then get stuck in the middle of the intersection; sometimes totally blocking traffic in the other direction for the entire time of the green light. The term gridlock was coined in response to an 8 hour traffic lockup in New York during a Christmas rush in the late 1970s. The light turns green, drivers head through the intersection as usual, but there’d be a blockage up ahead and some would get stuck in the middle of the intersection. They couldn’t back up because of cars close in back of them, couldn’t go forward. The light would turn green for the other direction, but they couldn’t move either and behind that line of traffic, drivers would block another intersection in the exact same way.
Gridlock wouldn’t work the same way here, but still could, in some circumstances, have extremely jammed-up consequences. The vast majority also understands what one-way, do-not-enter signs mean, but what about driving against the flow of traffic? Considering how commonplace it is, that even police do it, I tend to think not. If you are a teenager, who’s never seen any other pattern, who’s never taken a driver’s test, who’s never been taught basic rules of traffic and right-of-way, then you are unlikely to know the proper way to drive.
If, moreover, even when you are aware of the rules, there’s rarely a price to pay for breaking them, then there’s little incentive to be lawful. To us westerners, it all seems so obvious. When crossing at a traffic light, you wait for the pedestrian light to turn green – it even has a little walking person on it. What could be more simple? Yet frequently, walking on Norodom, I see little kids crossing against the light; very slowly, with trepidation, very dangerously, ploughing through several lanes of dense traffic.
They’ve clearly never been taught that basic rule. People routinely cross everywhere so they see no difference between ‘everywhere’ and the traffic light. In Phnom Penh you can see pre-teens hot dogging around the streets on their Chalys. I recognize Chalys don’t afford a high degree of motorbike tricks, but you get the picture. They certainly haven’t taken a driver’s test of any sort, been taught the dangers of speed or apprised of proper driving etiquette; simple things like looking before entering traffic. There are no speed limit signs that I’ve noticed and no penalty for speeding short of the ultimate, a crash. I don’t mean to imply that speed limits, education and enforcement would eliminate maniacal speedsters from the streets. I didn’t begin to slow down until I hit and nearly killed a teenager playing in the street, back in the sixties while driving a cab in New York. (At this point in my life, age and consciousness of danger have combined to make me uncomfortable at any speed more than cautious and mellow.)
Nevertheless, education and enforcement would definitely reduce the numbers of speeders. In my alley, people routinely drive too fast considering it has a blind corner and lots of little children playing on the pavement. It needs to have a sign that says, ‘Please Drive Slowly: Children at Play’, and a few speed bumps. If I had it together, I’d try to educate and organize the community and get those things done. Cambodia has its own rules of right-of-way, actually it’s only one rule: whoever gets there first has priority, and it helps to have a hefty vehicle.
This worked well enough in the past when vehicle counts were low, but progressively is breaking down as vehicle density rises. The problem here is that lack of clear rules of right-of-way result in accidents in the middle of the night as well as rush hour. Let’s say two vehicles are going in opposite directions, with one wanting to make a left turn. If the left turner doesn’t understand that he or she is supposed to yield the right-of-way to the other driver, confusion results. Just that situation happened to a friend, and a crash and a broken arm was the outcome; and that was at 4 am. The first priority is established rules that are widely taught, including public service campaigns in the media and especially in the schools.
These kinds of social changes don’t happen overnight. A few years back in Thailand, I think it was Chaing Mai, I saw large signboards placed at crosswalks warning drivers they were supposed to stop for pedestrians. Crosswalks mean nothing if the rules are not explicit and consistently enforced. While in Vietnam in 1994, I saw police standing at the curb turning back drivers going against the flow of traffic. Needless to say, Vietnamese police get a lot more respect from their citizenry than their Cambodian counterparts. Still, if the police stationed themselves at the curb and turned back every errant driver for a grace period of a month or two with no monetary penalty, drivers would get the message that there actually was a rule and it was being applied to everyone.
This would also result in increased respect for the police, the lack of which is a large part of the problem today; scoffing at the rules goes hand to hand with disrespect for the police. The Prime Minister has recently placed the high rate of traffic accidents as one of Cambodia’s biggest challenges. We’ll have to wait and see if that translates into real action to tackle the problem.
Stan Kahn
