Bamako traffic is- what? Intense? Yes, but that does not begin to convey the reality. I have survived a week of moto riding now, and I am still struggling to adjust. Riding in the city of Bamako is something like urban motocross, and something like a demolition derby (only with fewer impacts). Its something like the start of a motorcycle road race, except that the pack never breaks up and just goes faster and faster. They ride without helmets and without mirrors. There is always someone in your blind spot on both sides. And the motos are negotiating streets that are full of pedestrians, huge hand trucks carry heavy loads, bicycles, many also carrying heavy loads, cars, taxis, sotramas, trucks- have I missed anyone? The good part of riding in the intensely crowded center of the city is that there are no donkey carts there, nor goats, and best of all, no herds of cows (I actually had to make a detour to get around a large herd of cows in one of the neighborhoods last Sunday). Someone told me they saw a collision of a djakarta with a horse on this side of the river a few days ago. Not good. There are no drivers licenses, no license plates, no registration, no insurance, no drivers ed, no safe riding courses. Just 500,000 djakartas and maybe 50,000 taxis and 2,000 sotramas. There is no vehicle safety inspection, no emissions rules, no Clean Air Act- its kind of a libertarian paradise, actually. For the survivors. The survival rate is surprisingly high, similar to the adolescence survival rates in the U.S. Actually, that is no coincidence, since this is a country of adolescents, meaning that the streets are full of testosterone-crazed riders. My first instinct in heavy traffic is to try to blend in, keep up with the flow, but there was no way I was going to keep up with the testosterone-crazed riders. So I thought, OK, Ill stay with the girls, who constitute almost half the riders on the road. That didnt work, either. All right, I thought. Ill just stay with the pregnant women who have babies strapped to their backs. But they were also too fast and crazy for me. Well, maybe I can ride with the families, three to five people mounted on a 50 cc. motorbike. They can hardly get out of their own way. That would have worked, but you see families mostly in the neighborhoods, and not downtown. In the end, I had to fall back on the Sadio Sogoba school of urban moto. Sadio is extremely calm and deliberate, a super-conservative rider. I have to say that when I was riding on the back of his moto I thought he was too conservative. More than once, I thought to myself, Sadio, you could have made that. Just jump out there. We dont want to be here all day. Of course, I would never say anything. Only one person controls the vehicle. Dont distract them and dont make them any more nervous than they already are. But now that I am at the controls I am beginning to see the wisdom of Sadios approach. I have to keep telling myself I am not in a hurry. Its OK if everyone passes me. The only thing that matters is to arrive alive. There is a website called Roadskill, that studies traffic accidents and fatalities around the world. They predict that in a few years traffic accidents will be the leading cause of death in Africa. They point out that in North America and Europe traffic fatalities have declined in recent years, largely due to increased organization (another word for regulation, for all you libertarians). Probably the aging population contributes to the decline, too, as testosterone-crazed riders are replaced with boring, middle-aged drivers. But I dont see that process even beginning to happen in this part of Africa any time soon.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Nov 2014 05:01:04 +0000
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