Our Man in Tirana

Middle of the day. No other traffic. Dead straight road. Boy in Mercedes decides to play with his brakes. Tyres squeal. Boy loses control. Car slides. Car hits parked lorry. Result: Mercedes 0 - Lorry 1.

It's been a bad month on the roads. BIRN reports that 46 drivers were killed in traffic accidents during August. (In 2005 there were 308 fatalities in total. The statistics for 2001 indicate that 22% of that year's casualties were drivers of vehicles. This would suggest that the figure of 46 for August includes all fatalities, not just drivers.) It's a frightening number of deaths in such a small country, but watching how people drive in one sense I'm surprised it's not a lot higher. Driving back from Saranda we saw plenty of accidents and plenty more near accidents. One of these nearly involved us thanks to a moron who tried to overtake us on a blind bend. If you are reading this driver of Nissan SUV, CD 41-17 your bosses at EU-CAFAO will be getting the official complaint shortly. BIRN also reports on a spot of bother down south where villagers from Lazarat attacked a police station in Gjirokaster after some local criminal was shot dead by a special police unit, ...

It seems that our neigbourhood's improvised traffic calming system is much admired out there. I've found references to it here , here , here , here and here . Someone should work out a way to make some money out of this.

We had yet another accident on our wide straight road in bright daylight a couple of days ago. I heard the crunch but I'm not sure how they managed a head on collision in these circumstances. Obviously someone in the neighbourhood has had enough and has put in place a creative traffic calming system. It consists of two thick lengths of rope spread across the road. Surprisingly, traffic approaching these almost always slow to a crawl while crossing them. I'm not sure who is responsible for this very welcome development but there is a newly opened cafe at the bottom of the street with open air seating beside the road. I suspect they are responsible since having cars tearing past at high speed is not only unpleasant for their customers but also dangerous. It's too much to hope that the the responsible authorities will get the message and construct some speed bumps. Perhaps we need to find a lot more rope.

I was hanging around in the street watching the world go by when I heard a crunch. In a very Albanian kind of collision one of the pony-drawn carts that the Roma use had run into the back of a Volkswagen Golf parked nearby. The front right of the cart had hit the back left of the car damaging the bumper and the side panel. After a brief inspection of the damage the 'driver' of the cart climbed back up and took off as fast as he could, leaving the unfortunate owner of the car to deal with the consequences. This was bad, but what was really bad was that the policeman who was standing not 20 feet from me and no more than 60 feet from where the crash happened did absolutely nothing - he didn't go to the scene, he didn't talk to the man with the pony and cart, he didn't call anyone on his radio, nothing. Only when the pony man was a dot in the distance did he wander down to the car and have a look at the damage, though as far as I could see his interest was driven by cur...