When a Tehran taxi rushes past the exit you wanted, there's obviously only one thing for the driver to do: return down the bustling motorway at full speed... backwards.
Stuck in a nightmare traffic jam on one of the city's overcrowded main boulevards? No problem: veer into the oncoming traffic, then swerve back just a second before being crushed by that rapidly approaching bus.
Forget about signs and signals, rules and regulations, there's only one law that everyone who takes the wheel in Tehran apparently agrees on, and that's the law of nature -- only the strong survive.
"The first thing I tell my students is: be smart, be fearless and don't stop," says driving instructor Bita Jafari, who has been teaching novices the ins and outs of the capital's mean streets for 10 years.
"If you stop, you're doomed," she says. "The trick is to scare the other person into stopping."
It's a trick that doesn't always work, of course: fender-benders are not just something you see every day on streets of Tehran, but more like every few hundred meters (yards).
According to the best available statistics, the roughly three million cars on Iran's roads account for a whopping 250,000 accidents every year.
Yet the numbers alone can't do justice to the madness of the streets, where the only difference between a red and a green light is the color, and every intersection is a white-knuckle test of human willpower.
Lanes? Drivers squeeze seven abreast onto a road built for two, jockeying for every millimeter of space in a mechanical ballet of sheer nerve. Turn signals? You can't exactly signal a turn across seven lanes.
And woe to the foreigner who takes a "One Way" sign at face value -- especially if he's a pedestrian.
"I've been to a lot of places where the driving is tough, Cairo and Bangkok for instance," says an English businessman who asked not to be named. "But I've never seen anything like this in my life."
Everybody seems to have a different explanation for why each drive across town is a kind of battle royal, and for some it all boils down -- like so much else in Iran -- to politics.
"You have to keep in mind that it's easier to keep things under control when the people are in a chaotic state," says a teacher who also requested to remain anonymous.
"That's why there was such a terrific fight with the government over the traffic police," he says.
In the summer of 1999 the conservative-led army vigorously opposed a plan that would have seen it hand control of the capital's traffic police to Tehran city hall, which is dominated by reformists.
The army insisted no change to its prerogatives could be made without the express order of the nation's commander-in-chief, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The plan was eventually shelved.
But others insist driving was just as bad before the 1979 Islamic revolution, while still others say the revolution led to the chaos, as people felt free again after the end of the shah's repressive police state.
There are seemingly as many explanations as there are directions of traffic pouring into a Tehran roundabout, and taxi driver Taghi Bassiri says such extreme individualism is a basic part of the Iranian character.
"Everybody here just does what they want to do," he says, adding that other drivers sometimes roll down their windows to mock him when he is waiting patiently -- and legally -- at a red light.
"They stop when they want, they go when they want," he says. "People in Iran don't respect each other."
Many older Tehranis meanwhile point to a time-honored source of social ills: young people, who make up 65 percent of Iran's population.
"It's the kids who make the problems," says Ismail Maghani, an affable 75-year-old who owns a taxi service on one of downtown Tehran's busiest thoroughfares.
"They zig-zag all the time, back and forth. They can't drive in a straight line," he says. "Our older drivers hardly ever have accidents. The young ones can have two or three every year."
But anybody who has seen a frail, white-haired Tehrani put the pedal to the metal and weave through the streets like a Formula One champion knows it's not only the kids who make their own rules of the road.
"People have been told so often: don't do this, don't do that -- so when they see a red light, they just go crazy," says Maya Danesh, a 23-year-old photographer.
Driving instructor Jafari takes a more inspired view of the situation.
"Drivers in Tehran are like artists," she says. "They just follow the patterns they see in their minds."
And how do you cope with a city teeming with temperamental artists? It's not easy, she admits: "Most of my students are terrified." -- TEHRAN (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
