JEDDAH, 27 October 2004 — I was sitting with a friend the other night when he surprised me by saying, “Saudi Arabia is the best place in the world to drive.” Curious, I begged him to explain. After all, with roads that are a road hazard, and law enforcement not enforcing the law, what is there to like?

“You see that’s just it. The police don’t really enforce the law. I can drive like an ass all day, everyday with minimum bother,” he said.

I had to protest because I have received my fair share of tickets over the past two years.

“When you get a ticket, you can pay it when you get around to it. You see, foreigners with outstanding traffic fines who try to travel out of the country get stopped at the airport. They can’t leave until their fines are all paid. But as a Saudi, I don’t get stopped. I usually pay my tickets when I buy a new car or renew my license which is once every few years. My car isn’t registered to me, so it’s not a problem. You’ll be surprised at how inexpensive the tickets are,” he told me.

With that in mind, I paid a SR300 fine and received a receipt that listed the offenses that fell in the SR300 category on the back. My friend and I sat down with the list and looked at the list of offenses. Running a red light, racing on a public street without a permit (are there permits for that?) and leaving the scene of an injury accident that you are involved in all carry SR300 fines. So does engaging in sexual acts in a car and drunk driving. We wouldn’t have believed the last two had they not been on the back of the traffic department’s payment receipts for everyone to see. Naturally a couple of the offenses listed would draw the ire of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. “If anything is keeping people from having sex in their cars and driving drunk, it’s the mutawwas, not the traffic police,” my friend pointed out.

“If you are a wealthy guy who can afford a brand new sports car that can go 300 km/h or faster, you probably aren’t going to be worried about the SR300 speeding fine as much as you’ll be worried about the bad roads ruining your car. Can you imagine how fast people would go if the roads were actually properly paved?” my friend asked.

That’s when the conspiracy theory came to mind. We had to ponder. Are the roads intentionally left in a bad state to force motorists to slow down? It made sense. Why not? I’ve seen more people slow down for a pothole than for a policeman parked on the side of the road.

The truth of the matter is traffic tickets are nothing more than a nuisance. You pay the fine and that’s it. Your insurance rates don’t go up, you don’t have to go to court or traffic school, and your license never gets revoked.

“In the past, you didn’t even have to pay the fine if you had wasta,” a source in the traffic department told me. “Once a ticket is put into the computer system, no one can delete it. However, it can be assigned to a different national identification number or iqama number. That’s what was happening before. Your record would be wiped clean at the expense of someone else,” he said.

This practice of ticket reassignment might help explain how women and even those who are long dead sometimes receive speeding tickets.

Despite having a few good laughs, we came to the conclusion that the state of traffic in Jeddah is a serious matter. Thousands are needlessly killed on the Kingdom’s roads every year. Unless some kind of plan is developed and executed to deal with this enormous problem, Jeddah and its residents will continue to suffer, especially at a time when the number of Jeddah residents is rising quickly.