Postcard from... Beirut

When you get in a taxi in Beirut, it’s considered an affront to your driver’s skills if you put on a seat belt. So it was strange this week to have the taxi driver insisting on seat belts all round.

A new traffic law has met with mixed reactions in a country where it’s not unusual to see whole families riding a single scooter. The laws haven’t been amended since before the civil war and many people take to the roads with a wartime urgency and disregard for regulations. The hope is that the dire number of road deaths will be halved by imposing fines and penalty points for offences such as not wearing seat belts and texting while driving. Motorbike wheelies – a favourite when gunning down the highway – are also banned.

Drivers aren’t impressed. In Tripoli, in the north of the country, locals burnt tyres in protest. Many taxi drivers complain their 1960s Mercedes weren’t made with seat belts. Some expect the laws will go the way of others in this country; a brief period of strict enforcement, before bribery creeps in and everybody reverts to the status quo.

At one garage in the city, a burly mechanic was so horrified by the new regulations, he told colleagues he would take up the most dangerous of all vehicles on Beirut’s streets: a bicycle.