The second lane

In Mohandessin on a weekday evening, a car stops in the second lane outside a juice shop, hazard lights on, and the driver disappears inside.

Behind him a bus has to swing out into the oncoming lane. A car at the kerb is now boxed in, and its owner will stand there for ten minutes with a bag of groceries. Nobody in the juice shop gives this a thought.

The driver has done a calculation, and it is about one thing: whether an officer will come along before he is back. If one does, it is bad luck. If none does, he got away with it. The whole question has become a game between him and the person whose job is to catch him.

We are oddly inconsistent about this. Some habits get treated as a private freedom simply because they have been around a long time and everyone does them. Others, no more harmful, are seen as plainly wrong because they are new. Familiarity wins the argument before it starts.

But the second lane is not private. The moment what I do lands on someone else, a bus driver, a stranger with groceries, the freedom to do it arrives with a bill attached.

The officer is a side issue. So is whether the street will one day have a camera on every corner, which it might. Being caught or not caught was never the measure. The woman boxed in at the kerb waits exactly as long whether anyone writes a ticket or not.

What I do with my car, my volume or my rubbish reaches people who did not agree to it. Owning that is not a question of enforcement. It is the price of sharing a street.