Road Rage

Road rage

I wish I had taken a picture on the roads every three months or so in Bahrain for the past four years. There would have been no better way to explain my shock every time I came home from the UK on holiday but to show those pictures to someone. That must have looked like one of those videos you see in documentaries where a tree, or animal grows from a tiny dot to a huge monster.

I long for the time our baby Bahrain took us from any point A to any point B in a maximum of 15 minutes. The long, painful encounters of having to drive now have made me hesitant to accept being behind the wheel (even though having someone else drive me is not a control freak’s first choice). The anger I get from being in a traffic jam would have been bearable had I been surrounded by more pleasant drivers.

The fact that there are more and more people settling in Bahrain as it turns to a cosmopolitan country and as more families and youngsters choose Bahrain as their weekend destination, had caused traffic jams and the stress and pressure that comes with it into an undeniable, unavoidable, painful reality.

Road rage seems to be an increasing problem amongst drivers. Grumpy drivers range from foreign drivers who have drove all the way to our beloved country and therefore may be grumpy of a long drive (or simply because they did not receive enough driving lessons), drivers who drive for a living, foreign drivers who do not understand the unpleasantness of most drivers up to the regular Bahraini driver.

Okay, so traffic jams and the unbearable heat drives most of us over the edge, but why has driving in Bahrain become a great source of anger? Bahrainis are pleasant friendly people, but placing one behind the wheels will turn the nicest people into monsters. Being nice enough to signal, stay in your own lane and not honking at anyone will not work. Trust me, I have already tried that.

Even if you stick to the laws of the road (which anyone hardly ever does), you are prone to get angry on the road. This is simply because some people seem to think they are too good to wait in a queue on a traffic light like everyone else and try to cut in, or because they think they’re too fast for the road speed and you’ll get blinding lights to move no matter how fast you are already going as it is, or think they own every parking space that you have already made clear you are going to use. And what’s up with cutting in on girls? Do those guys seriously think we are scared of causing an accident THEY will pay for on their insurance bills later because THEY cut in?

When have we forgotten everything we have ever been taught about etiquette and that driving is about skill and manners? When has honking, cutting in, waving, gesturing, screaming and intimidating turned acceptable and common? When will it stop? When will “rudeness” on the road be prosecuted by the law? When will we enforce our own rules of kindness even when everyone around us seems to have not? When will we go back to being the simply, friendly Bahrainis we used to be?