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Comment by stmfreak | Hacker News Reader

I suspect this works in a homogeneous culture where everyone has the same concepts of queues, taking turns, and aversion to line cutting. But in a heterogenous culture with a mix of people who prioritize self over taking turns and regularly ignore queues, this would quickly become a disaster.

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> An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one. [0]

[0]: https://www.debretts.com/debretts-a-to-z/q/queueing/

Chinar

You just described Kathmandu perfectly. Very few traffic lights were ever installed, they never really worked due to load shedding. Now with the load shedding in the city removed these lights only flash orange (sometimes).

Recently there has been a clampdown on people skipping queues, driving on the wrong side of the road (all positive efforts).

My two rules, same as where I learned to drive on a farm in Ireland; avoid hitting people, avoid hitting cows. Everything else will take care of themselves (cars, bikes, buses, trucks).

According to multiple friends that are from Kathmandu, pedestrians are more like to be killed that injured from cars. The reason is if a driver disables a pedestrian they need to support them financially for life. But if they kill them they have a fine with a maximum limit. So it’s often less expensive to kill someone that to injur them. Therefore there are numerous cases of drivers hitting a pedestrian, not killing them, then running them down again to make sure they die.

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