The Left, Right, and Wrong Way

Anyone who has been a pedestrian at any point in life knows how careful he or she must be while walking on the road. I was in Amsterdam a few years ago and I remember their curious road system. There are various lanes that you have to watch out for if you want to cross the road. The first lane closest to the sidewalk is for bicyclists and skaters, then comes the actual road for the cars, then two tram tracks appear in the middle of the median (one going left and one right), then its cars going the other way, and then another bicyclist lane closest to the other sidewalk. You have to look left and right so many times while crossing their roads that by the time you get to the other side you not only have a terrible pain in your neck, you also tend to forget why you wanted to cross the road in the first place. The pedestrian situation in Karachi is very different and here you would find bicycles and motorcycles on the sidewalk, cars traveling both ways on the same road, some more motorcycles in the bus lanes, buses on the median, and pedestrian everywhere. Only thing similar about crossing a road here in Karachi is that you not only get a sprained neck from looking left and right so much, but you can very easily end up with a broken arm or leg if you are careless enough to forget why you were crossing the road.

Anyone who has ever driven a car at any point in life surely knows how careful he or she must be while driving a car on the road. You have various lanes on the road and the basic idea is to keep your car in the lane and avoid hitting any other vehicles or any pedestrians that are crossing the road. That's very easy to do, say in the USA, where you drive on the right side of the road, the lanes are well defined, and pedestrians only cross the streets if they are at the intersection. Driving in Karachi, the basic idea of driving has to be slightly modified in that you have to keep other cars, motorcycles, bicycles, rickshaws, buses, trucks, tankers, vans, eighteen-wheelers, twenty-two-wheelers, donkey carts, cows, and of course the pedestrians, from hitting your car. It becomes exceedingly difficult to achieve this since you have to drive on the left side of the road, the lanes are well-defined at many places but the people's concept of driving between them is not, and pedestrians, cows, donkey carts, twenty-two-wheelers, eighteen-wheelers, vans, tankers, trucks, buses, rickshaws, bicycles, motorcycles, and cars cross the street anywhere they feel like doing so.

So it is of no surprise that people (both pedestrians and drivers) here in Karachi pay very little or absolutely no attention to signs on the roads (unless of course they are big huge billboards with a very large picture of a girl next to a miniature washing machine). Perhaps it was because of this little detail that when my Karachiite friend came to visit me in New York a few years ago, he called me and told me he was waiting for me to pick him, and I asked him where he was, to which he answered, ‘I am standing next to a DON’T WALK sign,’ I told him, ‘hold on man, I will be right there!’ And you can probably imagine the anxiety and distress my friend went through when, after a few seconds, he saw the sign change to WALK.