Dubai: “It is 6.55pm! I am almost home. I can do it, I can do it! Just a few more minutes. I can’t be late!”
This is probably the conversation going on in the minds of most Muslims driving home, close to iftar time. And what happens when you are in hurry? Things tend to go wrong, because you aren’t paying attention. Add that to an average speed of say 80km/hour, and you have a surefire recipe for disaster.
According to a Canadian website, distracted drivers are three times more likely to be in a crash than attentive drivers. They also stated that “international research shows that 20 per cent to 30 per cent of all collisions involve driver distraction”.
A Gulf News report published in June, 2015, Ramadan in 2012 witnessed 190 accidents involving 360 vehicles, in which 11 people died and 185 were injured. At least 40 of those accidents occurred around the time of iftar. Colonel Saif Muhair Al Mazroui, Director of Dubai Traffic Police, was quoted in the same report saying that accidents were most likely to occur during that time, as “people tend to drive more aggressively between 4pm and 7pm”.
The American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, explains on their website that there are three main types of distractions for drivers. First is visual, when you take your eyes of the road, second is manual, wherein you take your hands off the wheel and lastly cognitive. This is when you take your mind off driving.
Gulf News spoke to readers to discover their driving experiences at iftar time.
“I was nearly run over by a car the other day, although I was walking on the pedestrian crossing,” Mena Migally said. This incident happened right before iftar in Dubai Media City, when he was crossing the street after he left his office building. Migally thinks that frantic driver behaviour around iftar time is unjustified, as “all professional facilities close early enough for anyone to plan their trips to where they will have iftar in a safe and timely manner”.
An IT professional from Egypt, he compares this “mania” in driving close to iftar time to extremely distracted driving, wherein “people who are fasting lose sight of safety and focus on the food”.
Migally added that there is barely any traffic during iftar time, and that leaving 10 minutes earlier could help drivers reach their destination safely. Instead, people are stressed and sometimes behave very badly as a direct result of that.
Two years ago Cecilia Zapata’s father passed away, and she was trying to get to her family. It was 2.30pm on a Ramadan day and a car behind wanted her to move out of the way. The neighbouring lane was full with cars, which obstructed her from moving out of the lane. The driver reacted by cutting into the full lane and moving over next to her car. He then pulled down the window, and swore at her. Perhaps he was fasting, perhaps he wasn’t. She can never be truly sure.
Around the same time, Zapata had another accident before iftar time, where “someone [a car] was trying to cut across and she couldn’t stop”, so she hit his car from the back. The person did not use the indicator to change lanes and so the police put him at fault. Zapata said: “You should know yourself better. If you’re punctual, you should leave ahead of time.”
Syed Ali, a sales executive, who lives in Sharjah and works in Dubai, travels to Abu Dhabi, Al Ain and Ajman for his job. He said that there is a lot of traffic on all roads around 2pm in Ramadan, because most people finish their work around that time.
“People don’t have patience. Everybody wants to go first. People are tired and that’s why accidents happen,” he said.
He advises people who want to head home around iftar time to start their journey at around 6pm. He himself leaves at about 5.30pm to avoid traffic on his way back to Sharjah. Furthermore, he witnessed an accident around iftar time a few days ago where two men, one on a bike and one crossing the road, were hit by cars and were badly hurt. He stopped to talk to them and discovered that they had been fasting.
He said: “People need to have patience, because everyone’s fasting and they do not want to fight. If they do not want to fight, they should have patience.”
Lena Sarkies, a medical representative based in Dubai, had a bus cutting across her car right before iftar. “I was driving in my lane, and the signal turned green, so I sped up. The bus was in the right lane. He sped up too, and he cut across me. Then he got angry like it was my mistake,” Lena told Gulf News. This incident took place at around 7pm on Khalid Bin Walid road, Dubai. Sarkies thinks that such behaviour is understandable because fasting individuals had not eaten or drunk anything the whole day, “It is understandable for someone to lose patience when they are extremely hungry and extremely thirsty and the weather is unbearably hot.” Sarkies advises readers not to leave to their destination before iftar as “traffic would be insane”, but to wait instead till after iftar: “No one is hungry, and no one is impatient”.
— The writer is an intern with the Readers Desk at Gulf News.