A few months ago, I spent a morning wandering the streets of Amsterdam. I was reminded again of the pedestrians' paradise that city is. A bit later, I was in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, which is sort of the anti-Amsterdam, where I am told that car culture is so prevalent that most major roads lack sidewalks. Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar, is something else entirely. It has a lot of cars. It has an enormous number of pedestrians. It has a lot of sidewalks. And it all just kinds of flows together.
I wouldn't put Yangon anywhere near the top of my list of "cities where I would never even think of driving a car." Compared to most of the major cities of India, Jakarta, Kampala, and Cairo, traffic moves in a fairly ordered way. The broad avenues of the city are generally marked with lanes and cars usually stay in them. Roundabouts, one of the many legacies of British rule, generally keep traffic flowing. There are theoretically crosswalks across these ever-flowing rivers of traffic, yet one has to gather either a significant amount of courage or a significant amount of fellow street-crossers in order to cross. It is not for the faint of heart. The fact that most people drive British-side cars when traffic flows in American style adds another level of fun.
Yet it's the secondary and tertiary roads of the city where things get really fun. Although there are sidewalks, those in the city center and temple are are generally jam-packed with street food vendors, tiny restaurants, and hawkers of everything under the sun. So pedestrian traffic, as in much of the world, flows into the street, flowing amidst the traffic rather than at its side. Pedestrians, many carrying various wares for sale or recently purchased goods, weave in and out of the stalls at street side, unhurriedly moving out of the way of cars or trucks that toot their horn. No one is in a huge hurry. No one can be in a huge hurry. The one point where it seems to me that things get really dangerous is 1) when the aforementioned street vendors goods involve immense cauldrons of boiling oil or 2) a crazy person on a motorbike decides to wreak havoc on the whole ecosystem. The combination of (1) and (2) is, of course, the armageddon scenario.
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| Street restaurant in Yangon |
Yet it's the secondary and tertiary roads of the city where things get really fun. Although there are sidewalks, those in the city center and temple are are generally jam-packed with street food vendors, tiny restaurants, and hawkers of everything under the sun. So pedestrian traffic, as in much of the world, flows into the street, flowing amidst the traffic rather than at its side. Pedestrians, many carrying various wares for sale or recently purchased goods, weave in and out of the stalls at street side, unhurriedly moving out of the way of cars or trucks that toot their horn. No one is in a huge hurry. No one can be in a huge hurry. The one point where it seems to me that things get really dangerous is 1) when the aforementioned street vendors goods involve immense cauldrons of boiling oil or 2) a crazy person on a motorbike decides to wreak havoc on the whole ecosystem. The combination of (1) and (2) is, of course, the armageddon scenario.
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| Flower market in Yangon |
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