Lebanese in cars are jamming progress

Lebanon needs to use more public transportation, but this requires a cultural and infrastructural shift.

I’ve been on a daily commute from Brighton on England’s south coast to central London these last two weeks. I’ve been waking up at 5am – as opposed to rolling out of bed and onto my laptop at 9am, which is my normal routine – and I’m out of the door by 5.40am.

I walk to Brighton station, where I arrive at 6.06am. The 06.30am Gatwick Express to London Victoria awaits and I am in my seat by 6.08am, because arriving early is essential for obsessives like myself who want the same, forward-facing seat every day. I arrive in London at 7.40am. I take the tube to London Bridge, where I buy a coffee and read the paper before work begins at 8.30am.

I know I’ve only been doing it for ten working days so far and I know many people find commuting awful, but there is something quietly unifying about hundreds of thousands of people heading to work together everyday.

Yes of course things go wrong; just ask the many thousands of commuters who use the much maligned Southern Rail in and out of London, and who are regularly forced to take the dreaded “bus replacement service” half way through their journey, but I am convinced that commuting is one of the components of the glue that both binds a society and by extension builds an economy.

When my wife worked at the American University of Beirut, she drove our family car the 4 kilometres to the Ras Beirut Campus from our home in east Beirut. The car sat five, but she never carpooled. The kids took the school bus. And she wasn’t, and still isn’t, the only one to do so. The Lebanese insist on driving everywhere. Anyone who takes the bus is perceived as a member of the underclass.

I’m not joking.

I once took the bus to west Beirut to avoid the busy Saturday morning traffic. It wasn’t the cleanest I’ve been on but it was the quickest and most-cost effective round trip I made in my 22 years of living in Lebanon.

The country is an environmental basket case with terrible roads and a refugee crisis. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if more Lebanese people got their heads around the idea of travelling to work together?

The last time I was in Beirut, just getting across town, a journey that should normally have taken half an hour, took 90 minutes, and yet when I drove in to work from the suburbs (yes, I am also guilty) I calculated that 90 of the cars with which I was miserably gridlocked had just one occupant. The Lebanese were, as ever, being gloriously individual – or selfish, depending on how you look at it.

Much needs to be done to create modern, efficient and clean public transport network of buses (let’s forget about trains for the time being, but a rail network does still exist – just) serving the whole country.

Meanwhile, the local entrepreneur Khaled Altaki, a man who also tried to bring Formula 1 to Lebanon, has been trying to launch a modern water taxi service.

It remains to be seen just how much impact that would have, if it ever got on the water.

But for the time being, carpooling, almost a social obligation in the United States, would surely at least halve the number of cars on the roads. It would also reduce costs and stress and surely cut down air pollution, carbon emissions and road deaths.

It would also make people more efficient.

It would also be a huge cultural shift, similar to the effort needed to abandon a corrupt political class and break with sectarianism.

The Lebanese suffer from chronic status anxiety, a situation not helped by the sight of politicians taking a convoy every time they go out to dinner

But it can be done.

Danish politicians cycle to work, and last year the British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was seen sitting on the floor of a crowded train.

A few years ago, before the last elections and no doubt trying to channel a similar populist approach, an optimistic prospective parliamentary candidate thought it would be a good idea to reach out to his constituents by taking the bus.

There was much unfair sniggering. Clearly the Lebanese expect certain standards from their leaders. Needless to say, he didn’t get elected.

My wife only remembers him as the “guy who took the bus”.

Michael Karam is a freelance writer who lives between Beirut and Brighton

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