There is a sentence that should embarrass an entire political class: in Lebanon, driving is not a basic act of daily life — it is a problem. Not a traffic jam problem, not a congestion problem born of too many cars on too few roads. But rather a more fundamental issue. We have never built the basic architecture, be it civil or physical, that allows people to get from one point to another without risking a fight, a fine that never comes, or a funeral.
In every country that calls itself modern, driving is no issue. You learn the rules once, the infrastructure enforces them for you every single day, and you stop thinking about it. In Lebanon, you never stop thinking about it because there is nothing external to guide you. No light tells you when to stop. No line tells you where your lane ends. No officer tells you that what you just did was illegal. So the only rules left are the ones you invent for yourself, corner by corner, moment by moment — which is another way of saying there are no rules at all.
Why every government has let this slide
It’s worth asking, plainly: why has no government ever tackled this? The honest answer is that traffic doesn’t fit the logic that governs Lebanese politics. It has no sect attached to it, no patronage network built around it. Fixing traffic lights doesn’t buy loyalty the way a job at a ministry does. It is exactly the kind of problem — cheap, technical, apolitical — that a functioning state would solve in a single budget cycle, and exactly the kind that a clientelist state has no incentive to touch. Neglect, here, is not an accident. It is the absence of any actor who benefits from doing the work.
Rules exist, even in a jungle
We often say Lebanon feels like a jungle. But that comparison is generous to us and unfair to jungles. Even a jungle runs on rules: territory, hierarchy, instinct honed by consequence. What we have on the road is something with fewer rules than that: a space where the biggest engine, the darkest tint, and the most aggressive horn win, and where the only real deterrent is the fear of a scratched bumper, not the law.
Get behind the wheel here and the day starts as a low-grade confrontation and rarely lets up. Every intersection without a working light becomes a negotiation with strangers, decided by nerve rather than right of way. Every unmarked road becomes an argument about who “really” has the lane. This isn’t hyperbole for effect; it is the literal daily experience of anyone who drives in this country, from the moment the key turns in the ignition.
Alone at the wheel
And here is the part that should trouble us most: citizens have been left to manage all of this by themselves. There is no traffic police presence dense enough to matter, no consistent enforcement to fall back on. So we do what any group of people does when a system is missing — we improvise, we curse, we honk, and sometimes we get out of the car. We have effectively deputized ourselves, without training, without authority, and without the calm that a real system would provide. It is exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with distance or duration. You can sit in traffic for 10 minutes in Lebanon and arrive more drained than after an hour on a well-run highway abroad, because 10 minutes here is 10 minutes of vigilance, not 10 minutes of waiting.
A small country, an easy fix — and still nothing happens
What makes this genuinely absurd is the scale. Lebanon is not a sprawling federal state where reform has to cross 10 jurisdictions. It is a small country. You could redesign Beirut’s core traffic flow, install lights at its worst intersections, and repaint its lane markings inside a single budget year — not a decade, a year. That the basics don’t exist here is not a matter of size or cost. It’s a matter of will.
We don’t have adequate signage. We don’t have functioning traffic lights at most intersections. We don’t have roads with visible lane markings. Cars park wherever the driver decides is convenient, until entire streets and sidewalks function as unofficial parking lots. And the license that supposedly certifies someone as fit to drive is, in practice, close to a formality — handed out with a rigor that would not qualify someone to operate a bicycle safely, let alone a car.
The result is predictable, and it shows up every year in a rising toll of deaths and injuries that gets reported, mourned, and then forgotten until the next one. None of this is fate. It is the accumulated cost of decades of a state that decided this particular failure was tolerable.
The fix costs almost nothing
What makes the neglect so hard to defend is that the remedy isn’t expensive or complicated.
It should start as follows:
Step 1: Awareness
A sustained, intensive daily public awareness campaign that actually teaches current drivers the basics: behavior, right of way, signal meaning, obligations, etc., and the penalties for ignoring them. This step can last for 6 months (it will be repeated at regular intervals thereafter), after which the law will be strictly enforced.
Meanwhile, the following steps will be undertaken during the six-month awareness:
Step 2: The Police
• Train the traffic police. A significant share of recruits reach the street without a working understanding of what a signal means or how flow is supposed to be managed. You cannot enforce a system you were never taught.
• Empower that police force; give it the authority, backing, and consistency to actually issue penalties and have them stick.
Step 3: Start with Beirut
Install and repair traffic lights, redesign flow at the worst junctions, implement coherent standardized road signage and lane markings.
Repeat step 3 for new regions, gradually covering Lebanon.
And finally, Driving License
Real conditions for obtaining a license: a test that filters out drivers who don’t know the rules, rather than a formality that lets almost everyone through.
None of this requires a miracle or a foreign bailout. It requires a state that decides driving should be, at last, a basic thing — not a daily test of nerve.
Until that decision is made, we will keep counting the toll, keep cursing each other at every unmarked intersection, and keep calling a broken system a jungle, when in truth it asks less of us than a jungle ever would.
