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Car capacity

The sight of a bunch of one-occupant cars in traffic has always stirred my ire, but since coming back from Cameroon, it irks me even more.

Maybe it’s having seen how many people you can stuff in one vehicle.

Seriously, a vehicle containing only a driver is nearly unheard of in Cameroon. On a trip to Kumba, Mike or Dan might leave the house the sole occupant of the truck (even that was rare), but you could rest assured by the time they’d left the village they'd have a few companions. The truck could be packed to the gills containing all 6 Scotts, me, and a pile of luggage for 2 weeks in Bamenda – and we’d still get requests for passengers to hang off the back bumper.

Even the fancy SUVs on the highway between Yaounde and Douala usually had as many bodies as seatbelts. If ever, by some strange circumstance, the driver was the only human occupant of a vehicle, most likely the rest would be filled with cargo of some sort.

So, now, seeing car after car after car clogging the roadways in Winnipeg with ONE occupant in each really gets my goat (which, in Cameroon, would be tied on top of the bus because there was no room inside).
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Comments

Tom said…
I am groaning heavily at that joke.

Just so's you know.
October 18, 2008 at 9:16 AM
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