Doug’s World

Fender-bender in Bogota

Traffic in Bogota is pretty chaotic, somewhere between Europe and Asia in my experience. And Friday morning I got to see how a minor traffic accident gets handled.

The bus we were riding on turned a corner a little too sharp, and I had a bird’s-eye view of the side of the bus scraping across a green sedan. The bus driver and the woman driving the car talked for a while, she made a phone call, and soon there were several police officers on the scene.

The officer in charge made a bunch of measurements, but I couldn’t follow the pattern. He seemed to be measuring the distance from various points on the car to things like the center of the sidewalk or randomly selected points along the curb. After a bit of that, the bus driver pulled around the corner to a side street, where the police officer took his driver’s license and continued the paperwork.

Then a manager from the bus company arrived on the scene, and she flagged down taxis to take us to our destination (the classroom where we were doing the training). There were about a dozen of us, so we were distributed among several cabs. I was the only English speaker in the cab I was in, and was surprised to discover after we pulled into traffic that nobody in the car knew where we were going. So we drove back to the bus, where the bus driver told our taxi driver where to go. By the time we arrived at the classroom, people were a bit worried about what had happened to us due to the long delay — our destination was only a few blocks from where the accident had occurred.

At the end of the day Friday, I was glad to see the same bus driver waiting out front, with a different bus. So it seems his little fender-bender wasn’t a career-ending move.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 13th, 2007 at 1:05 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.