
It’s hard to picture a superhero on a cycle, but after watching self-styled ‘Traffic Droid’ a.k.a. Lewis Dediare in action, I have to admit it’s actually doable. Dressed from head to foot in black lycra, with seven video cameras mounted on his cycling helmet, Lewis rides around the streets of London with a single mission – to fight a ‘war of attrition’. You see, the man has taken it upon himself to rid the streets of ‘idiot’ drivers who are a threat to cyclists like himself.
Among the 39-year-old’s other weapons are a camera mounted on a three-foot pole protruding from his bicycle, and a measuring tape. The tape is used to measure the distance that larger vehicles maintain from him on the streets. If it’s anything different from the prescribed amount, he admonishes the drivers and shows them a ‘red card’.
If you plan to visit Vietnam, prepare to forget everything you ever learned about crossing the street. Forget about waiting for the traffic to stop, forget about zebra crossings, and forget about traffic lights. Because in Vietnam, people cross the street by charging right ahead, weaving their way through moving traffic. It’s the only way to do it!
It sounds dangerous, I agree, but it also seems kind of fun, in an adrenalin-pumping kind of way. I’ve just spent the past hour reading about how it’s done. This is from a Vietnam Travel & Living Guide: “You want to get to the other end of the street but it does not look quite feasible. Unless you try it. Crossing over the jam is actually not that bad. You will just have to do it. The magic is that no one will ever run into you.”
I watched a few videos as well; it really does seem like magic. The streets are filled with moving scooters and cars, and the pedestrians just flit across effortlessly. They seem to maintain an intense focus on the oncoming vehicles, finding gaps and moving through them slowly but steadily. There’s just no other way, given the fact that traffic is a nightmare in major Vietnamese cities like Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh.