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  • May 16th, 2004
  • Comments Off on Iranian police in safety crackdown on anarchic drivers
Iranian police, better known for their severity towards women with a fringe of hair showing or youngsters listening to "depraved" music, are concentrating on a more conventional threat - bad driving.

For several weeks they have been mounting a crackdown on the capital's anarchic and pestilential traffic, standing in their thousands along the main highways, a book of tickets in hand.

But though the campaign seems to be having some effect, they are afraid that once it is over motorists will go back to their bad old ways, driving without seatbelts, using mobile phones at the wheel, taking short cuts up one-way streets or ignoring traffic lanes in a bid to escape the horrendous congestion.

Much of the time the jams even prevent a policeman summoning an errant driver to pull into the kerb. Instead the officer, in a light green uniform and a green cap, scratches the registration number in a notebook for the sinner to be notified of his offence by post.

Despite, or because of, its network of freeways, Tehran is suffocating under the density of its traffic. Technically its capacity is 1.4 million cars, officially it has to cope with 2.5 million, and this figure is constantly swelling.

In a bid to stem the tide and regulate the vehicle flow, the police are pulling out the stops. Parking fines have been increased five times to 50,000 rials (some six dollars), while using a mobile telephone or failing to wear a seat belt can cost 100,000, a considerable sum for the average Iranian.

Petrol prices have also been hiked by up to 23 percent, but still remain among the lowest in the world, with a litre of super costing just 1,100 rials, while public transport remains hopelessly inadequate.

One policeman said that he was doing his military service standing in the choking pollution generated by obsolete and ill-maintained cars for five hours every morning and five hours in the evening.

One driver, a doctor, dismissed the measures as merely designed to fill state coffers, adding, "Things won't be fixed by checking seat belts." Many motorists also doubt that it will do much to bring down the huge number of deaths on Iran's roads, which topped 25,000, or three an hour, last year.

Mohammad Safari, an officer on duty by the Modaress expressway, was sanguine.

"Once the police disappear, people go back to their old habits," he remarked. "When we are there, it's okay, even if some people pretend to have buckled their seat belt when they are really just holding it. Now they are keeping to four lanes, but when we go they will be back to seven."

But at least, he added, the morning bottlenecks now eased around 11:00 am, instead of 2:00 pm.

Safari said the police would deploy even more reinforcements, but he could give no indication when they would be ordered back to their more usual tasks.

Meanwhile women seem to be taking the opportunity of letting their hair and ankles show a little more as they walk down the street, less afraid of being stopped by society's moral guardians.

Conservatives who swept the Tehran city hall in last year's municipal elections say they are working to improve the daily life of residents, though they have clamped down on cultural centres and other places where boy meets girl.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2004


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