I drive like you do

When it comes to driving, Penang is paradise, that’s provided if you drive like Mad Max. Yes, quoting “partially” Chow Yun Fatt from Pirates of the Caribbean, “Welcome to Penang” Driving here is really a test of your skills, many thanks to the driving attitude of the people here. From the moment you step into the road, automatically it turns into a war-zone where you need to avoid cars like avoiding bullets, navigate to you destination like navigating thru a minefield where the mines are as big as lorries, trucks, bus, cars which is “strategically” parked almost anywhere they like. There’s truly something wrong with the picture here. Not only that, driving here can made even a person as nice as an angel turn into a devil instantly as you cannot “tahan” but to swear and yell and shout each time someone misconduct on the road or you thought they misconduct.

For a long time I’ve been wondering why most of us locals has such bad driving attitude on the road but up till now, the reasons seems so many that’s its even hard to pin point a main one. Lets look at some of the major misconduct frequently conducted by our “rally” drivers here. One of the more common phenomenons is queue cutting. Most drivers here have no patience and usually the bigger and more expensive the car they are driving, the worse is their driving attitude. How many times has you swear and curse when someone overcut from the side of you during a turning at the traffic lights? How many times has you say “Char Ben-sii Dai Sai Meh!”? If cursing and swearing gives us bad karma, then driving is a sin and since almost all of us need to drive, no wonder it’s so hard to reach enlightenment :D.

Another thing I observed, not only in Penang is that most of our local drivers like to park or stop their cars “as near as possible” to their destination with disregard to whether they are obstructing traffic or not. They will just simply stop and park, then walk away or sometimes orders Hokkien Char while inside their car. I always wonder why can’t they just park a few meters further and walk a few steps instead of having to block everyone’s path and make people swear and curse again. Maybe like my previous entry, this kind of people lack courtesy or maybe like in Digi’s advert “Aiya, I dun care la, I’m Dai Kor mah!” We all know what happen to him in episode two right? :D

The last habit I wanted to mention, and one of the most dangerous to do is not giving indicator signal at the correct moment. I’m not quite sure whether we are just plain lazy or suffering from carpal turnal syndrome but many of us don’t put the effort of turning on the indicator lights when we want to turn or switch lanes. This is one of the major accidents causing reason and even more so when most of us drive like we are acting in Too Fast Too Furious. Is it really that hard to turn on the indicator light? Maybe we can’t blame ourselves, we are already using one hand to hold the hand-phone, another hand korek hidung, our right leg on the accelerator, left leg on the dashboard, where got hands/legs to turn the indicator huh?

Actually, if we want to blame something on the major causes of our driving attitude, its called selfishness. Everyone wants to be fast, everyone wants to be the first and everyone always thinks they are right and the other driver is wrong. For example, when the front car is going slower a bit, we call them road hogging and maybe starts swearing and honking. If we see the a car behind keep blinking and honking us to go faster, we’ll say “Aiya wanna go so fast for what? Cannot wait to go heaven ah?”. Its human nature to be selfish and its not easy to change but “IF” we can all learn to be a bit tolerant and demonstrate some empathetic skills while we are driving, the road will be a much more safer place to be :D