Driving in Tunisia

My apologies once again. I’m afraid I cannot give you my latest experiences behind the wheel of an electric car. My car is carefully stowed in my garage, 5,000 miles away from where I’ve been on a road trip through Tunisia.

My original plan for this post was that I would report back and let you know the current status of electric vehicles in North Africa, or at least Tunisia. Alas, I went nearly the entire trip without anything to report. We drove over 1200 km. First we navigated Tunis, then drove west across the country to Tozeur near the Algerian border, and then east across Chott el Djerid (the largest salt flat in Africa) to the coast. Through that entire time I didn’t see a single electric car.

Then, finally, on our last day we drove the country’s biggest highway, the A1, from El Jem to Tunis. Along the way we stopped at a couple of rest area/service stations on the toll road and I finally spotted an electric car charging station prominently placed right near the door to the café/convenience store.* It was my first glimpse of EV infrastructure in Tunisia.

I’m still not completely sure what the existence of this charger meant. It was brand new, prominently branded with the Chinese EV company BYD’s logo, and it looked like it hadn’t been used much. At the next rest area I found another one. This time there was a BYD SUV parked next to it. But it was unclear how long it had been there. The car was boxed in by large pylons, so it’s quite possible it was just there for show. I suspect I saw the first small steps to promote and build an EV network in Tunisia.

Alas… that’s all I can faithfully report!

But even if I don’t have a lot to write about electric cars in Tunisia, I did take away a few lessons from my time there. I’ve driven in a number of countries around the world and every time I do I’m fascinated to learn how driving practices differ from place to place. It reminds me just how important the formal and informal rules of the road are in making car transportation possible.

The root causes of the different rules are wide and varied. Some of them are a result of infrastructure. Some are a result of the economy. And some are the result of the fact that different groups of people can come to different solutions to the same problem.

For instance, in Tunisia I ran across very few stoplights. There were a few in Tunis. Curiously those were nearly all on 10-lane “highways” and were not anywhere near an intersection. I’m guessing they were there to keep the smaller roads fed by the big road a bit more passable. Once we left Tunis, however, I don’t think we saw another.

Stop signs? Yeah… there are a few. But for the most part when two roads come together it’s left to the drivers to figure out what to do. If the stoplights and stop signs disappeared in Phoenix, there would be gridlock stretching miles. But the Tunisians have accepted this infrastructure as the status quo and developed ways to handle it.

The result is significantly more orderly than you might expect. If you need to merge with traffic or drive through a busy street, you boldly (but carefully!) stick the nose of your car out in the direction you want to go. As long as traffic isn’t flying by, people generally let you in or let you past. It is as though everyone wants to get to their destination as quickly as possible… but they also realize that traffic jams slow everyone down. So drivers will cede a few feet to make sure others can clear out of areas sooner rather than later.

The Tunisian economy means that there are not a huge number of cars. Most people simply can’t afford them. That would keep the roads a bit more passable… except that people still need to get places. As a result many people rely on cheaper transportation, especially small motorbikes. Especially in the towns, but also on the high speed routes between cities, you’ll find many many motorbikes zipping around. The good thing for them is that if the roads become clogged with pedestrians, cars, and the occasional horse pulled wagon, they can still usually find a crease to slip through. The bad thing for car drivers is that you have to be hyper aware at all times because it can be a lot harder to spot a motorbike flying by than a Mercedes.

Actually, “hyper aware” is a good basic approach to driving in Tunisia. Because while you’ve got the cars and motorikes I’ve already mentioned, you also have speedy louages (small buses that shuttle people from city to city), horse-drawn carts, the occasional camel… and speed bumps. So many speed bumps.

I’m reasonably fascinated by speed bumps. They are the simplest of inventions. All you need to do is grab some dirt (or rocks or asphalt or cement or metal or…), pack it down in a line in the street and voila, you have made an immediate change in the world. You’ve intervened in a complex sociotechnical transportation system with a technique that will either slow down traffic and/or inflict damage on those who choose not to behave as you wish them to. You’ve used technology to create a significant social change.

As you drive across the country, nearly every Tunisian town will welcome you with at least a couple sets of speed bumps. Some towns are nice enough to post signs warning you where they have placed their speed bumps. Some use the same sign to let you know that somewhere ahead you’ll find a speed bump. And some towns don’t bother to warn you at all. You just have to know.

The locals all seem to know exactly where the speed bumps are and they take them very seriously. The inter-city roads are often posted at 90 km/hr. Cities and villages have posted limits of 50 km/hr. And the speed bump warning signs post a 30 km/hr speed limit. But most Tunisian drivers (perhaps because their cars could actually lose pieces if they hit them hard?) slow down to a crawl when they get to speed bumps and perhaps take them at 10-15 km/hr. I was much more relaxed when I had a local driving a bit in front of me so their brake lights could show me exactly where each speed bump was. In Tunisia, speed bumps are an incredibly effective way to compel drivers to slow down and they’ve become ingrained not only in both practice and knowledge of local geography.

Before you drive in Tunisia, you should also know that lane lines are used quite differently here. Drivers frequently straddle them or simply drift far to one side of a lane. For the most part I think they do this to keep their options open. Not all traffic moves at the same speed. Cars vary widely in quality plus there are the motorbikes, pedestrians, and makeshift stands on the side of the road selling watermelons or mint tea. Because everyone knows the lane lines are just suggestions, everyone is ready to expand or contract to accommodate the variety of obstacles while still keeping traffic flowing. Curiously I heard very little honking in Tunisia. I think there is a general understanding that driving is not straightforward and thus everyone seems to have a little more patience with the actions of others.

Using lane lines as suggestions rather than rigid requirements has other benefits as well. One highway we drove on in Tunis was freshly paved with new asphalt and the lanes were not yet painted. It was a bit of a white knuckle drive for me to be on a highway ten lanes wide without any official guidance of where I should be in that vast expanse. I chose a car in front of me to follow, and sweated just a little bit as the parade of cars I was motoring along with expanded and contracted to adjust to the ever changing width of the road and frequent exits. Because drivers were ready for this, everyone got along pretty safely.

As for turn signals… I use mine pretty religiously for both turning and changing lanes. That is not a common practice in Tunisia. I don’t think I ever saw them being used to turn a corner. Instead, drivers pointed their nose in the direction they wanted to go or, sometimes, would hold a hand out the window as a polite request to be allowed to turn in front of oncoming traffic.

In some ways, the traffic in Tunisia is too complex and requires too much precision for tail lights to offer much help. To the right of a given car might be two different roads, a place to park, and pedestrians they may be picking up. If you keep track of the subtle movements of other cars you have a far more reliable indicator of exactly where they want to go than a binary blinking light can offer.

There was one time when people reliably used their turn signal – when they were behind a car they wanted to pass. Drivers would use their turn signal to let the car in front not only that they wanted to pass, but also which side they were intending to pass on. Having been the car in front a few times, I can attest that the signal was legitimately useful.

I probably should have stopped using my turn signals the way I do in the US so as not to confuse the locals in Tunisia. In the end I decided to keep up the practice if only to warn other drivers that I probably had no idea what I was doing and that they’d be wise to give me a wider berth than normal.

I suspect that many American and European drivers would look at the traffic in Tunisia and exclaim that it is a crazed mess. When you look closer, however, there is not only method to the madness, there are millions of people who carefully adhere to the unwritten set of rules that allow the traffic to flow. It is certainly different from what we call “order” back home. But Tunisians have a different set of conditions than we do in the US. The wide variety of vehicles on the road, the lack of sidewalks, the fact that roads are frequently used by enterprising sellers, and the slowness by which stop signs and lane lines get erected are all accommodated by the Tunisian approach. And somehow they do it without the constant honking that plagues many American cities.

There is one other aspect of the Tunisian traffic system that I want to mention. Local entrepreneurs have responded to the widespread use of motorbikes by setting up mini gas stations on sidewalks. Tunisia has the kinds of gas stations we have in the US, but they’re usually at the edge of town or even outside the towns altogether. If they were the only source of gas, their distance from city centers would make it awkward, time consuming, and expensive for motorbike owners buzzing around town to fill up their tanks.

So a number of Tunisians have set up small gas dispensaries in the middle of towns, often on the sidewalk in front of a mini mart or repair shop. They put five gallon tanks on a stand and turn on the spigot to fill up small bottles a half liter or two at a time. These small amounts are enough to keep motorbike owners fueled for errands around town. Seeing the success of this pervasive independently created system of fueling made me wonder whether a similar hyper-local fueling option for EVs might help enhance our flexibility and mobility.

My experience in Tunisia reminds me that traffic systems – both the written and unwritten rules of the road – can be different from one place to another and from one time to another. They can, and should, be adapted to local conditions, concerns, and infrastructure. When those conditions, concerns, and infrastructure change, its probably time to rethink the sociotechnical system that allows us to get from point A to point B.

If EV adoption continues at the pace it has been it may be time to re-evaluate some of the things we take so for granted we don’t even think about them anymore. I don’t know that I’m ready to leave the comfort of well-defined lane lines, but as we change the vehicles we drive there is a good chance that we will need to rethink the ways we order that driving.

Follow up: I’m still heading back home and had a layover in Paris en route. In my first 15 minutes outside Charles De Gaulle airport I saw more EVs and heard far more honking than I did over 6 days of driving around Tunisia.

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*Curiously, in the Midwest of the United States we used to call a rest area with a gas station and convenience store an “oasis.” That word has a rather different meaning here in Tunisia.