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An amble about Beirut a gamble

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published May 15, 2005

	Hezbollah grows in stature in Lebanon
	[AP photo]
	Thousands of supporters of an exiled leader gather in Martyrs' Square in downtown Beirut on May 7. Be careful where you step if you visit. Potholes are plentiful, traffic lights few, and speeding cars everywhere.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - One measure of a great city is its walkability. Can you imagine going to London and not strolling through Hyde Park on a fine spring day, or visiting Paris without cafe-hopping down the Champs Elysees?

Beirut is known as the "Paris of the Middle East," but alas, it's more Mideastern than Parisian when it comes to its walkability. As in too many Arab cities, pedestrians need divine providence, nerves of steel, or both.

This isn't to knock the good people of Beirut, who have done a remarkable job of rebuilding their city after 15 years of civil war. In putting up all those sleek new buildings, though, couldn't they have saved some concrete to fill in the potholes and fix the broken pavement?

"It is easy to twist your ankle or fall if you're not paying attention," warned the 7-year-old Lonely Planet guidebook. Things haven't changed much - 10 minutes after I set out to explore, I stumbled off a cracked curb and felt a stab of pain in my left foot.

(All's well that ends well - it was a minor sprain, and I got out of the emergency room for the unbelievably cheap sum of $72.)

Another thing Beirutis forgot when remaking their city was traffic lights. If someone can prove to me there are more than four lights in this sprawling metropolis of 1.2-million, I'll buy them a bottle of Lebanon's excellent Bekaa Valley wine.

Beirut does have one great place to walk - the corniche that runs for miles along the Mediterranean. On balmy spring evenings, families settle back in plastic chairs to watch the sunset while old men smoke hubbly bubbly pipes and vendors hawk corn on the cob.

How do all of these people get there?

The distance between my hotel and the corniche was less than 20 feet across a one-way street. With no traffic lights to stop them, however, cars whiz by so fast you could easily wait five minutes for enough of a break to sprint from one side to the other. Seeing my look of panic, the hotel bellman would step into traffic, raise his arm with the authority of a school-crossing guard and hold back the flow so I could scuttle across.

Farther west, where the street widens into a four-lane divided highway, vehicles roar along the corniche at such warp speed it is suicidal to even consider a crossing. I finally realized that some residents of the apartments and condos on the far side of the highway drive to the ocean side even though they have to go miles out of their way to do so. There's something absurd about driving to take a walk, but that's life in the fast lane.

During Beirut's steamy summers, activity shifts to the nearby mountains, where wealthy locals and gulf Arabs have built fabulous second homes. To get to them requires ascending a steep four-lane highway on which drivers compete to see who can pass the fastest on tortuous curves.

"Many, many accidents here," a taxi driver said, pointing to a large break in the median divider where a Syrian tour bus had recently met a gruesome end.

(Speaking of Syria, traffic is equally heavy in Damascus, but at least it has numerous traffic lights and traffic cops. And people actually obey them.)

Beirut is by no means the only place in the Mideast where the words "pedestrian" and "friendly" are rarely heard together. We're all familiar with the unique horrors of Iraq, where motorists and walkers alike face instantaneous death from car bombs.

In the rich Persian Gulf oil states, walkers suffer from intolerable heat and SUVs going 120 mph on 10-lane superhighways. Like Beirut, the Qatari capital of Doha has a wonderful waterfront area. On a visit two years ago, I was within walking distance of the corniche, but traffic was so bad I had to take a taxi to get there. And 15 minutes into my stroll, I was so drenched with sweat, I looked as if I'd fallen into the gulf.

Urban planners can't do much about the heat, but they can do something about the sidewalks, traffic lights and all the things that make a pedestrian's life a little safer and easier.

After all, there's no better way than walking to get to know a city - the parks, the cafes, the beauty parlors and barbershops where day-to-day life unfolds. Careening from place to place by car produces a sense of disconnectedness for visitor and native alike; walking knits together people and communities.

While in Lebanon, I read that the same wealthy family that rebuilt central Beirut is investing heavily in Amman, Jordan, another unwalkable city with madcap drivers and crumbling sidewalks. Maybe they'll come up with a redevelopment plan that remembers pedestrians and does a better job of controlling traffic - in Amman as in Beirut, you go to sleep and awake to the sound of squealing tires and screeching brakes.

It's enough to make you put in the earplugs and have sweet dreams of U.S. 19.

Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com

[Last modified May 15, 2005, 01:22:06]