Travel by Taxi

Every long journey begins with a single step, and my first step on this journey was into a taxi. “Where are you going?” the driver asked me. “Ah, to Moscow,” I said, then quickly remembered that what he needed to know was whether to take me to Dulles International or Reagan National Airport. “National Airport, please.”

“Moscow, huh…” the driver said. “My sister spent four years there.”

“Was your sister there as a student?” I asked.

“No, she’s a career diplomat. She’s now ambassador to Belgium.” I learned that my taxi driver has a brother who’s a surgeon in Atlanta. Clearly they’re from an unusual family. They happen to be immigrants from Ghana. My driver described himself as having spent the past twelve years in “academic prison,” preparing himself to be a pulmonologist. Having just sprung himself from medical school, he was now spending his last month of moonlighting as a taxi driver.

Conversation was more limited with my next driver, one who met me at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow. I immediately regretted the months, nay, the years that I’ve neglected to study Russian seriously in spite of my regular need for it. The driver and I chatted cheerfully about the weather (it was beautiful), but not much else. I was somewhat aghast when he raced off at more than 130 kilometers per hour, which I estimated to be something more than 80 mph. But before I could figure out an appropriate thing to say, we screeched to a crawl as we hit Moscow traffic. For the next hour I rarely saw the speedometer nudge above 8 kph, just a little above walking pace. It was not rush hour, and there wasn’t any particular cause for congestion, other than too many cars on the largely unimproved roads.

In Ekaterinburg I experienced rush hour traffic, more properly termed gridlock. Slava sent a driver, Sergei, to pick me up before the gala banquet celebrating the 20th anniversary of the founding of his Science and Engineering Center. If I had walked, it would have taken me 40 minutes to get there. By car it took longer.

Sergei knew not to drive down the main street, Lenin Prospect, at rush hour. Even on side streets I could see bottlenecks forming as cars crammed into intersections before the lights turned. We took a circuitous route and still got caught in heavy traffic. I might have missed most of the meal had Sergei not taken a few liberties with traffic laws. There’s one lane reserved for electric trams, and when there aren’t any trams around, it’s awfully tempting for automobile drivers to scoot around traffic using that empty lane. Sergei took that shortcut several times and avoided getting caught by either the police or by tram cars. But sometimes miscreant drivers do get caught in a bottleneck straddling tram lines. I bet I’d hear a lot of vigorous Russian in such a situation.

I don’t expect to take any more taxi rides for a while. I like the trams here. And I also travel “na pishkom,” that is, by foot.