Driving in Cambodia

August 16, 2008
11:15 PM ICT
Room 228, Salina Hotel
Siem Reap, Siem Reap Province, Cambodia

Just a brief note about Cambodian traffic.

Cambodian traffic is fucking insane.

One of the local people who I’ve been working with has been studying to get her driver’s license, and was complaining about how many rules there are to learn. As evidence, she pulled out her driver’s manual. Now the Ontario Driver’s Handbook is like 60 pages long – probably more. The Cambodian driver’s manual was a 4 page brochure, 3 pages of which were traffic signs.

Now, admittedly, few people read the Ontario Driver’s Handbook cover-to-cover, but this is because the rules of the road have been driven into our heads since the day we were born, because everyone follows almost all of them with near-100% consistency. Now I know we’ll speed sometimes, and people don’t put on turn signals with the regularity they should, but everyone obeys stop lights and drives on the right side of the road.

There is no such consistency in Cambodia. This could be because the Cambodian traffic laws were just passed earlier this year. I don’t mean the latest, safest version of the traffic laws – I mean the first ever set of traffic laws in Cambodia. And my god they need them.

Most people drive pretty slowly, but they kind of have to, because there’s no guarantee of who will be on what part of the road heading in what direction at any given point. A large part of the problem are the motorcycles. Probably only 10% of the vehicles on the road are cars. Cars are good because they’re relatively large and they don’t handle well or fit in small spaces. So they kind of follow rules no matter what. No such luck with motorcycles, which are probably 75% of the vehicles on the road (the other 15% are bicycles and pushcarts full of food). (The flipside of this debate, of course, is that cars are big, expensive gas-guzzlers, and if one car takes up the same space as 6 motorcycles, and both transport 1 passenger, cars are more than a little stupid. But, they have their advantages.) I remember once we stopped at a stoplight (in our car – we have a driver and everything), and within a few seconds there were motorcycles that had surrounded the car. Like surrounded. Probably a dozen of them – all squeezing into tight spaces between each other, even if it meant being fully perpendicular to the road. At one point, one driver who was waiting to turn right got bored of waiting, so pushed through the other motorcycles and drove up on the sidewalk, almost running over several people, to make his turn.

Another time, our driver pulled out of a space that was on the left side of the road (relative to where we were going), and the right side of the road was kind of busy, so he just drove on the left until he could find a place to get in. And this wasn’t a couple seconds, it was probably a block and a half. With cars and motorcycles maneuvering around us going the other way.

And several times we've nearly gotten into accidents (generally with motorcycles, that would have been destroyed - likely severely injuring the driver and/or passenger, while we in the car would likely remain mostly unharmed.)

I should note, though, that the most popular mode of transportation for tourists are tuk tuks – motorcycles, with a little carriage attached behind that has padded seats with enough space for two in the back, and they’re a damn nice way of getting around. Pretty comfy, and kind of fun. Still kind of crazy, because you’re in a carriage that’s perhaps not securely attached to the motorcycle – which, as I previously indicated, follows no traffic rules – but still fun.

It also seems that, while tourists take tuk tuks, locals take 'mototaxi', which is a ride on the back of a motorcycle, which as I indicated in a previous post, is fucking scary (though significantly cheaper than mototaxi - but the difference is $1 US v $0.50 US for a five minute ride, so...). And yes, there are many many stories of people falling off mototaxis and getting very very hurt, and probably taking one with a fever is a bad idea.