Traffic, Traffic and more traffic Jam

Wednesday, birthday of Hazarat-e Ali was a national holiday in Iran and father’s day (finally a day in Iran for men with all due respect for our hardworking women:). It was around 7:00 am we (my parents and I) decided to take a trip to North of Iran heading to Namak_abrood, to visit couple of family friends. We got ready and left our home heading for Chaloos road. The route to Chaloos was clear and plain up to the exit from Kardj to Chaloos. Then as soon as we arrived we faced a packed jam traffic. A traffic that prevented us from either returning to Tehran or going forward to our destination! We spent about 3 hours in queue of cars bumper to bumper. If I had estimated correctly we only moved forward about 2 km in entire 3 hours! Then, we decided not to go further and return! (So, we decided to take a trip to cheloo-Kababi in the city:). While we were in traffic jam, a police car passed by who announced that Chaloos road has reached its capacity and the entire road to Chaloos is completely jammed! I should mention with so much traffic there was one bright side. People were celebrating the traffic by playing loud music and dance!
While in traffic observing all this sceneries, I kept thinking traffic is an integral part of large cities. From New York City to Tehran they all have their own typical traffic jam. However, Tehran has different characteristic when it comes to traffic and its corresponding rush hours. Contrary to other big cities that the rush hours starts during the time that people commute between work and home, in Tehran however, we don’t usually follow the same pattern! No matter what time of day it is we may encounter traffic and to someone’s surprise during rush hours you may see no traffic at all!! This unpredictability of our system is something that makes Tehrani’s life not monotonic (I suppose this is again a bright side of this whole story)! However, I believe this is the main factor preventing us from any proper planning in for any work we do or follow certain forecasting blueprint as other counties tend to do.

In my humble opinion reasons behind the traffic jam in Tehran are many. Though, I will discuss those that I feel have the most impact on the entire system.

1. Cultural values: apparently it is so hard for us to give a yield to right! We usually move in from Side Street to the main street with tremendous force and no mercy to the driver on the main street! Image someone wishes to turn. You will hear the nonstop sound of horns coming from everywhere. We have come to this conclusion that no one has right more than us. Therefore, we should block her/his way and continue our path forward no sympathy considered! Kill or get killed!

2. Staying in a queue of street lane that is backed up all the way to kilometers is against our character and religion!! We should go from the most right to the most left, try to force in our car while blocking other side of road lane…(ok, ok, I know someone wishes to say that is because we don’t have enough roads, though).

3. Dilemma known as Timing of red lights on the intersections in Tehran: I never understood why it takes less than a second for a green light to change the color to the red and all this changing happens, simultaneously. Right at the same instant the other side of intersection goes from red to green! May be it is because of this fact that Tehranis are so quick in reacting during driving! The entire process takes less than a second!! I personally don’t understand why not giving about 3 to 5 seconds between green and red, so, the intersection would get cleared up before the cars from other side of intersection speed into the opposite path and a big time traffic would take place!

4. Many fellow drivers have no idea of what is proper driving or can’t recall anything they did when performed the driving test: have you ever noticed no person pre-decides his/her destination before gets to an exit or intersection! This is a last minute job for a drive. Right when s/he is completely on left side of the street, all of the sudden by the time the driver is by the intersection s/he wants to turn right.

Having said that, I have to admit once again by start of new school year we should expect to see huge parking by the name of Tehran has once again established!!!!