Driving Out Phnom Penh’s Tranquillity

The cars and motorcycles once banned by the Khmer Rouge as bourgeois have returned to Phnom Penh, charging madly down potholed streets.

Gone is the serenity of tree-lined boulevards that made such a welcome contrast to the raucous congestion of other Asian capitals.

Now, cars with horns blaring swerve past motorcycles packed with people, horse-drawn carts loaded with goods, bicyclists balancing wooden planks and pedicabs full of squealing pigs.

What traffic laws the city has are seldom enforced, so it is every driver for himself. There are no real traffic lanes, and vehicles often wander into the path of oncoming traffic.

Phnom Penh has only six functioning traffic lights, and only rarely does one produce an amber warning.

“Green light is go--just go wherever you want. There’s total confusion,” said Capt. Rajeev Sirohi of India, a member of the U.N. operation overseeing the transition to peace after nearly 13 years of civil war.

“The small-town traffic in India, in spite of the cows and buffalo being there, is better than this,” he said. “Even the buffalo and cows on the road have more sense than the drivers here.”

Oum Oeun, 33, said he fears intersections, so he usually gets off his bicycle and walks across.

“The motorcycle drivers don’t pay attention,” he said. “They look right and left and then they hit me.”

It is traffic officer Sor Sam Ang’s duty to quell the anarchy from his stand in the middle of the Achar Mean, the city’s main boulevard. He fears for his life, bending and dodging to avoid being hit.

“I am afraid, but what should I do?” he said. “It’s my job.”

He said there are not enough policemen in the entire city to arrest all the traffic violators.

Phnom Penh’s traffic problem began in 1987, when the government allowed private motor vehicles for the first time since the Khmer Rouge ban in 1975.

The Khmer Rouge tried to turn Cambodia into a primitive agrarian commune during its murderous rule, which began in April, 1975, and ended with the Vietnam invasion of December, 1978, that installed the current government.

When the ban on private vehicles was lifted, Cambodians seized upon their new freedom without bothering to go to driving school, Meas Samith of the Transport and Communications Ministry said.

Things got worse after free-enterprise economic reforms of 1989, which boosted incomes and, as a result, the number of private motorcycles and cars.

Chaos arrived with the signing in October, 1991, of a peace accord that brought thousands of U.N. peacekeepers, businessmen, diplomats, tourists and expatriate Cambodians, along with the vehicles needed to move them around.

The numerous white U.N. vehicles are driven by personnel from about 40 countries, many of whom follow their own domestic traffic rules.

Jose Bonillo-Gollart of France, 30, died Aug. 22 of head injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident in Phnom Penh. U.N. spokesman Eric Falt said dozens of other U.N. personnel have been involved in traffic accidents.

Most patients in Phnom Penh hospitals are traffic victims, U.N. doctors say, but they have no statistics to prove it because few accidents are reported to police.

U.N. police are training local officers to direct traffic and enforce regulations, and a traffic engineer will bring some order to the system, said Peter Fitzgerald of Ireland, chief of operations for the U.N. police.

He said the engineer will draw up an overall design for the city, create a system of one-way streets and add more traffic lights, markings and signs.