Long shutter, Colombo evening
Sometimes I forget that this isn’t normal. We’re taking the kid to school. Today the cow isn’t nosing at the gate. We can leave without gathering mangos to bribe her down the street. The neighbors did an ice cream dansal (street alms-giving) last night and the canopy is still taking up half the street. There’s a van parked and an old lady having a chat in the morning commute is always a bad trip.
The streets are flooded. The streets are narrow. We pull over to get the kid to put on his seat belt. We’re behind a bunch of construction sand piled on the street. Merging into traffic we come across a school van heading straight for us, going the wrong way. OK. We’re on a detour to avoid the main road but now we get to the right turn down Hill Street. There’s a pack of dogs in the intersection, grinning stupidly. I thought they were having an orgy but it looks like they’re just hanging out. Normally as you head down Hill Street there’s a bit of beauty as you see the ocean over the overpass. I can usually tell how the sea is feeling by what color it is. Today I think I didn’t even look.
The left turn off of Hill Street gives you a green light at the same time as pedestrians. So you’re turning into pedestrians, every day, by default. It’s confusing, but I don’t get how something can be confusing every day. There must be another word for that (that isn’t a swear).
There’s more traffic going into Colombo than out (to Mount, where school is). People heading in try to drive in the oncoming lanes, which is illegal and rude, so the cops set up cones. These cones are nothing unusual, they just mark the normal, legal lane boundaries. It seems unnecessary. Just ticket the people.
The traffic gets messed up today cause a cop is jaywalking across the street carrying cones. When there’e a human crossing the person immediately in front usually stops, but everyone else uses it as a sort of pick-and-roll blocking tactic. Same goes for ambulances. Everyone swerves around the cop, messing up the traffic flow. It takes a while for things to readjust.
The hallowed St. Thomas college is the worst. There is no traffic plan, just hundreds of cars snaking through roads wide enough for a bullock cart at best. What baffles me most is that there actually is room – hotel and restaurant parking – that simply isn’t open. Everyone could cycle through there if there was a plan, but those vacant, paved areas remain closed. I don’t get why those places don’t just open up and hand out menus to the parents. I for one would be grateful, plus people are forgetting anniversaries and stuff all the time. Top of mind is not a bad place to be. No one has thought of that though. The cars just form an ad hoc loop down a narrow one-way road. And the school vans. And the trishaws.
When I was single I used to drive fast and not care. Now I drive slow because I do. Not stupid slow, which is also dangerous, but I leave a car-length ahead and don’t rush. Today this is infuriating the guy behind me, who is honking incessantly. There’s like three cars behind me and we’re driving down a residential street with kids and animals in the road. I know the road and it’s not possible or even worthwhile to pass, but he keeps trying, running into speed-bumps and oncoming traffic. I just keep driving but it’s irritating.
What Sri Lankans call a two-lane road is what Americans would call a driveway, or an alley. Even these roads sometimes randomly narrow out to a one-way stretch, with no particular warning. You just have to hope your car gets in first, cause whoever gets in second will have to back out. The road narrows like this, then clears. I turn off and the honking donkey behind me honks again for good measure. He’s got kids in the car. I don’t get it.
Get back to the intersection and the dogs are still there, grinning off to the side. Guys try to pass, running into oncoming traffic and honking cause they’re angry. If you have to honk in order to pass, maybe it’s not safe to pass. Maybe just wait till, say, you’re not cutting across a pedestrian crossing in front of a school between a bus and van full of children. Or maybe not. Get back home down our actually narrow lane and there’s a huge school bus parked directly in front of my gate, looking confused. I would say FML, but that it doesn’t even register as especially bad anymore. This is my life. These are the Colombo streets.
Nice post and I feel your pain. It makes me appreciate the roads that allow me to move about so freely in this land I have adopted. Fixing the transporation issues in Sri Lanka would be a Sisyphean task. I would love to do it though :-)
How would you start? I’d get the trains moving better. We have enough rail for a decent Colombo service, at least in and out of fort.
The first thing that I noticed when I visited this year was how the edge of the travelway is where all the commerce began. The impedance to the traffic is almost immediate. This is tied in to the fact that there is no zoning. You cannot mix commercial facilities right next to residences. There is no way to manipulate the traffic in this situation because the access to the main highway is not controlled.
Yes better regulated public transportation would be one way to go. If you can move faster and easier via public transportation, more people would use it and reduce the current one person per car situation. If there are flexible work hour options for businesses that can operate that way, the traffic could be reduced by getting people to start work earlier and leave earlier and better yet telecommute a few days a week.
The emissions need to be controlled with large fines for gross polluters….maybe then more people can bicycle :-) (yeah right!)
We actually dont have enough rail. We only have two railway lines going anywhere, and as they are for trains going in opposite directions, the express trains and the slow, both run on the same track. I think this is the reason for the delays. I’m not an expert, but I guess we would need at least one (preferably two) more track to make trains keep to schedule. There is a third track being built going north out of Colombo, but only for a short distance, and the train is still bumpy and slow on it.
I read somewhere that the railway network has not been extended by a single kilometer since the British left. The Sinhala-Buddhists like to brag about their architectural accomplishments, but unfortunately there is little to see in the way of modern architectural accomplishments. Even the trains are pretty much the same as one would find during the colonial times. Let’s not get started on the walkways and haphazardly constructed intersections. While the war was on, the probability of getting caught to a fatal accident while utilizing one of these was far higher than getting caught to an LTTE bomb.
That’s why I always try to take their ptciures to help me get to know them and to remember them. But with my poor memory, I am not very successful. Not for lack of trying, though.
I think they do share some responsibility, but as I say in my opening paragraph, they shouldn’t shoulder all of the blame. The villages I visited that needed drinking water projects had all been polluted by mining in the 60′s prior to opening up. I think there has also been little discussion of the role multinationals have played in providing new manufacturing process to China that are greener than what was in place before opening up. A good reference point would be Mao’s Great Famine, which discusses China’s environment during the great leap forward.
Quelle ravissante petite fille, toi Mathilde protégée par une soeur qui comme moi habite Toulouse?Je me reconnais un peu dans cette petite fille, dans la manière dont elle est habillée. Nous defons être de la même génération!Mais je n'ai pas eu la chance d'avoir de soeur…Belle journée Mathilde
Add more of him please.. There are clearly new ones of him… It’s driving me crazy… I don’t want to use my credit card for jockbutt… I want to see more of paul.. I love him soo fucking much!!! He’s my favorite model.