On the road
Idlan posted this BBC article about Malaysian drivers. It made me smile, remembering how Dr Mahathir, our beloved former prime minister, used to rail at the "Western media" for misrepresenting Malaysia & Malaysians in general.
...many Malaysians pay little attention to the rules of the road, and in the past, police have largely ignored the problem.
The report makes it sound like the traffic on our roads is totally chaotic. I would like to state for the record that most Malaysian drivers DO manage to stick in their own lanes, for the most part. I just wish that when they wanted to change lanes, they'd actually INDICATE their intention of doing so...
I would also like to state for the record that we DO generally stop at traffic lights when the light is red, go when the light is green -- and accelerate when the light is amber. (That's a very old Malaysian joke.) Besides which, most of us wear our seatbelts like obedient little citizens and stop at junctions with stop signs instead of speeding out like over-confident morons. If we double-park, that's coz there are insufficient parking spaces and anyway we're only gonna run into the bank for 5 minutes.
However, sometimes we only obey the letter of the rule, not the spirit of it. Daphne Lee wrote a great article in The Star newspaper on Sunday about ensuring a safe ride for children in cars. She says in the 1980s, when police began enforcing the mandatory seat belt rule, her father "would just drape the [non-retractable] belt across his body so it appeared as if he were wearing it. There was no thought about why he was expected to wear it. Safety? He had been driving for over 20 years without a seat belt and without mishap. Why should not wearing a harness suddenly put him in danger?"
These days there are still people driving around in old cars who do the same. Besides that, others who drive more "modern" cars sometimes attach a contraption to the belts to "jam" the belt so that it won't lie tightly against the person's body. I know of at least one friend who does that. She, and others like her, don't seem to realise that it totally defeats the purpose of wearing a seatbelt in the first place. I haven't said anything to her, though, mainly coz I don't know how to say it.
My awareness of car safety measures comes from Dad, who has always been a careful person given to thinking ahead. I have pictures of my 3-year-old self strapped securely into a car seat in the back seat of our car. It's also due to him that I still buckle up every time I get in the driver's seat, even if I'm just driving round the block to get bread from the nearest convenience store!