Dangerous Driving

Riding around and seeing how people drive here is one of the most frightening experiences. There are lanes in the road but it doesn't seems to matter. The drivers are fast, follow insanely close, switch across 4 lanes of traffic in 2.5 secs, brake suddenly, general aggressive and impatient driving. There is a lot of money, really nice cars, and the auto industry is not hurting for business. In a country of 25 million people 675,000 cars were sold in 2010. The car market in KSA is worth $9 Billion.

This is a country where only men drive, and it is also a country with one of the highest auto fatality rates in the world. The leading cause of death for men 16-36 is traffic fatalities. There is an average of 17 fatalities a day in the Kingdom. The research is showing that in a country that is so restricted in so many ways there are few outlets besides getting in a car and driving crazilike. Check out YouTube, crazy Saudi drivers, I hear that gives you a pretty good idea of what is going on. They do this thing called drifting where they drive quickly across several lanes of traffic at a high speed and can flip the car behind them from the wind force. This is fun? Uggh so dangerous, again refer to the fatality statistics. There are huge cement barricades everywhere to protect pedestrians. Actually, there are even barricades on the hospital grounds where I work, but really are people driving so quickly around a hospital they found cement protectors necessary? Sadly, yes. 

So Americans think we have it bad at the pump, but really we've always paid the lowest of the western countries, by far. The neighbors to the north, Canadians are paying about $5/gallon; the Brits are paying over $8/gallon, Americans are at about $3.50/gallon. While here in Saudi Arabia gas is $0.64/GALLON! Huh? Well to be fair Saudi Arabia controls a large quantity of the worlds oil, that's one way of sharing the wealth with the people of the nation.