Wednesday, September 05, 2007

If only...

"...our police patrols are constantly around Dubai. They are everywhere and anyone guilty of committing this crime can, and will, be arrested in seconds."

That's what Brig. Issa Aman deputy head of Dubai Traffic Police told 7Days.

The story was about the growing menace of drink driving, but that's only one of the moronic practices of so many of our drivers. Relatively uncommon too. Jumping red lights is, in my opinion, at least as dangerous as drink driving and happens far more frequently. So do many other dangerous offences such as hard shoulder driving, double-parking blocking major roads, tailgating at high speed, general dangerous driving and all the rest of it.

'The police are everywhere'?

We wish.

the 7Days story is here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I never drink and drive. I never did it in my home country, so why do it here? Taxis here are realtively cheap and easily available. I know at least 15 people that regularly "boast" about how drunk they got last weekend, and how "fun" it was to drive their car home. Most of them frequent the numerous bars at Madinat Jumeirah. Have I ever seen police there? Nope. If Dubai Police were serious about this "crack down", they should simply have a road block outside the Madinat every Thursday and Friday night. They'd make dozens of arrests & fines... "Cha-Chiiing!"

Anonymous said...

crossing the red is the first-step of ending our lives!

Anonymous said...

errr...... maybe I'm being a bit thick here, but given that 98% of the drivers on Dubai's roads proceed in an erratic fashion guaranteed to get them pulled up in many other countries on suspicion of drunk driving, how do the police identify real drunkards from crap drivers ?

More to the point, since most of the (very few) police seem to drive in the same erratic fashion will they actually spot anyone at all ?

As is usual in Dubai, they are tackling symptoms (and please, I'm not condoning drunk driving) rather than tackling the main problem : that most of the people on the roads have absolutely no concept of safe driving.

Anonymous said...

The other day a car spun out of control right in front of me on Shk Zayed Road, there was a police car behind me at the time, he just slowed down, did the rubbernecking bit like everyone else and drove off! At least he was paying attention though!