If my memory doesn’t fail me, it was more than half a century ago when I first found myself in the United States in the company of my fellow Georgian youth activist organizations of those old soviet, socialist days. I remember that America surprised all of us in many different ways, but personally for me, one of the biggest surprises was the traffic and the behavior of drivers in that most powerful country of the world. What I am talking about is the way the drivers maneuvered on crossroads without traffic lights, absolutely self-regulating, without any assistance of a traffic officer gesticulating in front of your nose which direction to take. The cars passed, in turn, slowly and nicely. If, by any chance, some persnickety driver, loathing the wonderful unwritten law, wanted to pass the crossing out of turn, they would be middle-fingered or booed by those who happened to be at that particular crossroad at that particular moment in time. Watching the cute American traffic ‘show,’ I wanted to immediately replant the model to our soil, and I had a lot of reasons to wish for that desire to come true.
The substituting of socialism with capitalism, and the details of our coming closer to the western way of life, has not much changed our traffic behavior, although state control over it has become stricter: we still want to mispark our vehicles, overtake each other, toot or flash a car in front of us when it doesn’t make way, cut off other drivers, obstruct flowing traffic, shout obscenities at each other from a moving car, show explicit finger combinations to an erring fellow-driver, treat cruelly poor bashful learners, and so on.
There is definitely something wrong with the way we operate in the street while driving. The typical American MVA (Motor Vehicle Administration) would qualify our kind of handling the wheel as offensive driving, and would send many of us off to take a special course in defensive driving, designed for traffic offenders who get caught breaching the rules. Fact: most of us Georgians are flagrant offensive drivers, the reason for which might be the overall condition of our national nervous system. Meanwhile, defensive driving as such is a perfect way of behaving in a traffic, lessening the number of accidents and saving more lives than we might ever imagine.
The way we behave in the street contributes tremendously to our chance of westernization
The attempts of Tbilisi City Hall to reshape the traffic flow within the capital, where preference is given to both big buses and minibus services, is only welcome, although the weird way taxis pick up and drop off passengers in the middle of the street leaves a lot to be desired – This is exactly where lives get endangered!
There is one more traffic feature that characterizes the street behavior of our pedestrians, who often baffle our naturally edgy drivers with their habit of choosing to cross the streets wherever it occurs to them. What happens to be most bothersome is when grownups do this while pulling small children along by hand – a criminal element to their streetwise behavior if ever there was one.
To put these thoughts on a broader scale of analysis, it would be fair to note that the way we behave in the street, whether we are drivers or pedestrians, contributes tremendously to our chance of westernization. It would not be an overly big exaggeration to throw in a symbolic parallel here between the way we behave in the street and the way we do business in general. The style of our behavior out there in the street could easily be extrapolated on any walk of human life, be it in the car, in the business world or in the sphere of culture. Most importantly, and disturbingly, our grownup habits are transferred from generation to generation, as in a relay race, and might restrict the way of development forever unless our young men and women reason over the problem independently and bring in patterns of conveniently modern and winsome behavior that are more compatible to our westernized way of life than anything practiced until now. Well, it’s never too late to take up the chance to self-improve, including the opportunity to improve our spoiled sense of traffic. And the good news, for a change, is that we Georgians are very quick learners, and we already know quite well what it means to be given a chance to become an organic part of the Western world in the fullest meaning of the words.
Blog by Nugzar B. Ruhadze
