life on the streets

It certainly has become cliche to bemoan traffic in big-city America, especially metro Los Angeles, where gridlock, "road rage", and just plain idiocy are accepted as the norm. As both a bicyclist and a motorist, I definitely tend to think this way, and recent stories of a spoiled playboy wrapping his million-dollar Ferrari around a telephone pole while doing 160 mph (!) down PCH in Malibu, or miscellaneous drivers plowing into my law-abiding cycling teammates on recent rides only confirms my sense of anarchy on the roads. But the geographer in me knows full well that our roads here in California and the USA are remarkably tame, orderly, and even safe when compared to so many other parts of the world. There was a piece last year in the Atlantic Monthly about Iraq, for example, contrasting the orderly traffic within the American-fortified "Green Zone" with the seemingly lawless jungle on the streets throughout the rest of Baghdad--not even taking roadside bombs into account. Admittedly, that's a special situation. But it really isn't all that exceptional. For example, I received the following tidbit this week in a free e-mail update from The Economist:

The migalka, a flashing blue siren that sits on top of sleek black cars, inspires road rage in even the calmest Moscow driver (of which there are few). Left over from Soviet times, migalkas are seemingly ubiquitous, a symbol of official privilege available to anyone with political connections or very deep pockets. Like the sirens of police cars, migalkas enable drivers to run red lights, rush down the wrong side of the road and even lurch onto sidewalks. Anger about these sirens boiled over in Moscow on February 12th, when 1,000 cars took to the streets in protest, many of them brandishing signs slamming the “hot rods with sirens”.

This ire is justified. In 2005 the governor of the Siberian Altai region was killed in an accident: armed with a migalka, he drove down the wrong side of the road at 200kmph and ran into a car making a left turn. In early February, a court found the other driver guilty of the governor's death, and sentenced him to four years in a labour colony. The verdict caused outrage across the country and inspired the Moscow demonstration. Participants said their action was part of a demand for fairness and equality before the law. Alas, the protest cars quickly got caught in Saturday traffic. Their route was further obstructed by traffic police, stationed every kilometre to break up the convoy.

Stories like these shouldn't keep us from observing and agitating against the very real problems that we face on the streets and highways of California and the USA. But they should at least give us pause for thought to appreciate how good we truly have it. Indeed, given how law- and rule-abiding the vast majority of American motorists are, it's really shameful that we have so far still to go in devising such rules and laws to make our streets safer and more convenient for all of us, no matter what mode of transport we're employing at the time.