During my research, I found that in addition to matt ers of civic responsibil-ity and ethics, corruption was also a part of everyday parlance linking the chaos of driving with broader structural issues of social disorganization.
In July 2010, a Lebanese television news program, Al-Fassad (“corruption”
in Arabic), featured as its main guest Ziad Aql, director and co-founder of YASA. Th roughout his interview with the program’s combustible host and in responding to questions from callers, Aql drew connections between chaotic driving and forms of government corruption. “In a system where we have twenty cars driving around with the same license plate number and people gett ing driver’s licenses without taking the test,” he argued, “it is not surprising that we have ‘chaos’ on the streets. Th e numbers of accidents, the problems with traffi c, these are problems of corruption.”
While the television program Al-Fassad provides a platform for citizens to air grievances about corruption in and beyond the realm of traffi c, the Lebanese Transparency Association, a nonprofi t organization, focuses on advocating for reform in governance and citizen behavior. In a meet-ing I had in 2010 with Badri Meouchi, the association’s executive director, he detailed their three key steps: raising awareness, doing research about how to improve the system, and making recommendations to the decision-makers about the changes that should be made. When I used the phrase culture of corruption, Meouchi bristled: “When you say culture it sounds like something that can’t be changed, something that comes from families and traditions. . . . It’s bett er to think about it as a question of habits, of prac-tices. Let’s take the parking meters, having to park inside white lines and then get out and go and pay at a machine! I mean, come on, . . . this is some-thing you couldn’t ever imagine Lebanese doing! But now they are doing it.
And they like doing it!”
In this sense, to take Meouchi’s point a bit further, the chaos in Beirut could be contested through awareness, education, and the incorporation of new habits into everyday life. Curiously, in fact, Meouchi’s comments about Beirut residents’ reception of the parking meters, particularly given that any form of parking serves as a constraint on unfett ered automobility, provide a counterweight to the discussions of Lebanese-ness that argue for the cul-tural authenticity of a mobility that breaks all the rules.
Th e pay-and-display electronic parking meters Meouchi spoke of were a recent addition to Beirut’s streetscape. Th e meters, along with the construc-tion of pedestrian bridges and the installaconstruc-tion of traffi c lights, were part of the Urban Transportation Development Project (UTDP), an infrastruc-tural eff ort funded jointly by the World Bank and the Lebanese Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR) to improve traffi c conditions
in and around Beirut. I met with the manager of the UTDP in Elie Helou in 2005 and again in 2010 at what marked, respectively, the early and fi nal phases of the project. In 2010, aft er a conversation during which he spoke with pride when detailing the infrastructural improvements that had been completed and with frustration about the state’s inability to successfully manage and administer the traffi c system that makes use of these improve-ments, Helou walked me from his offi ce to the front of the building housing CDR in downtown Beirut. Helou, a garrulous presence, waxed contempla-tive when I asked him about the lessons learned through his involvement with the project. Echoing Meouchi’s sentiments about unforeseen citizen behavior, Helou paused a bit before saying, “You know, I really thought,”
then, correcting himself, he continued, “No, we all thought that the parking machines were going to be the weakest part of this project, . . . that there was no way that people would use them, that people would hate them and complain about them all the time. But it turns out they are the strongest [part of the project], the most successful part. People really like the parking machines.”
Meouchi’s and Helou’s comments about residents’ use of and satisfac-tion with the parking meters gave support to the idea that the chaos of driv-ing in Beirut was, at least in part, the outcome of a disorderly government that took litt le, or ineff ective, action in ameliorating the traffi c situation.
Moreover, the order imposed by the parking meters was one welcomed by citizens, perhaps, I want to suggest, because they constituted a transparent, effi cient, and predictable system. Th e locus of the system, in the case of the pay-and-display parking meter, was a technology that seemed to prove both gratifying and empowering for its users. Although other traffi c-related infrastructural improvements, such as new roads, pedestrian bridges, and even traffi c lights, gave the promise of effi ciency, stability, and predict-ability, their success relied signifi cantly on the eff orts of the state actors to manage how these roads, bridges, and lights would be used by drivers and walkers. Th e parking meters, though also a technology of government that was part of the engineering of public space, aff orded citizens a more direct relationship with civic order and regulation, one that was achieved through interface with technology rather than interaction with the human face of government. Th e parking meters, in a sense, created the possibility of a diff erent politics of mobility in Beirut. In this way, sentiments about governance were manifest too in discussions of a chaotic mobility in Beirut.
Maha, a woman in her fi ft ies who raised two now-grown daughters on her own, in summing up her feelings about how the state should deal with unruly driving, invoked the roles of parent and child: “Th e government is responsible fi rst, not the citizens. . . . It’s like parents and children, the par-ents have to show the children the right way.” To extend Maha’s parent-child analogy a bit further, in the context of everyday mobility, an ill-functioning relationship between citizens and state was fostered by feelings, on the part of citizens, of not being taken care of by the state.