Why did the Canadian cross the road?

To get to the other side of course. But easier said than done in Casablanca traffic

Note to the owners of the Four Seasons Hotel on Boul. de la Corniche: you have been sold a counterfeit Canadian flag. Maybe the the consulate can bring you one that isn’t a cheap knockoff.

As I’ve mentioned once or twice, the first thing I do when I hit a new city or a new neighbourhood is take a long, rambling walk. In Casablanca, the walks have been long, but rarely rambling.

My first morning here, I had a few missions: find a Maroc Telecom office so I could get a tourist e-sim; get some MAD money (the Moroccan currency, the dirham, is abbreviated MAD. So I needed to change some CAD for MAD), then get some groceries to fill the empty fridge at my airbnb.

In a lot of places I’ve visited, I’ve felt my map apps exaggerate how far apart things are. They make the distances seem much longer than they are in reality, so I have often been pleasantly surprised at how quickly I was getting around.

In Casablanca, the opposite keeps happening. Things that I thought were a few blocks away end up being a good kilometre or two distant. Nothing seems to be near anything else. So the nearest Maroc Telecom outlet was a 30-minute walk south-east or 34 minutes due west. (For my Montréal readers, it’s like walking from Crescent and Ste-Catherine to Westmount City Hall. Not a killer, but literally not a walk in the park here in Casa, as the locals call it.) Ah, well, I thought, at least both outlets are on major thoroughfares. Since my map apps don’t work without data, and my French data doesn’t work in Morocco, I wanted a simple, straight line to the nearest SIM card.

While the route was straight, the path was decidedly less so. I’ll never complain about Montreal street renewal work again. Here, building renovations or demolitions (it’s sometimes hard to tell which is which) frequently force you into the street, where there’s no area marked off for pedestrians. Not that it matters, as I have come to learn, because even at pedestrian crossings here, stopping seems to be optional. But more on that in a minute.

So the 2-kilometre walk up the major avenue turned out to be a bit of an obstacle course, one that boasted stray cats, fresh and stale dog poop, cracked and missing sidewalk tiles, and moped/motorcycle drivers who weave in and out of traffic like they think they’re on Tatooine. (Geek reference. Google it.)

But the real test of your skills as a Casa pedestrian is the aforementioned crosswalks. Unlike in Toronto, for example, where even glancing in the general direction of a crosswalk causes drivers to screech to a halt a half block away, Casa crossings seem to be more of a suggestion.

Like: maybe you can cross here. Maybe it’s better than jaywalking, but not by much. Maybe some of the drivers in the three or four lanes of traffic in each direction will see you and slow down, or maybe they are looking at their children as they shout “keep it down in the back!” Maybe they’re saying, “Let the guy behind me stop, I already stopped for a whole bunch of pedestrians this week. It’s not my turn.”

The Boul. de la Corniche, which parallels the North Atlantic seawall for about 4 kilometres, has up to three lanes on each side of cars and motorbikes zipping along at at 40 to 60 km/hour. There are occasional stop lights, but they are pretty rare. This is a roundabout culture, after all, where flow trumps slow trumps don’t go.

In my first encounter with a casa-cross, I waited for some invisible sign to signal the drivers to stop. Instead, I saw my fellow pedestrians wade into traffic with varying degrees of alacrity and confidence. Some walked straight across like they had a direct line to the traffic gods, others traversed hop-scotch style, one lane at a time, waiting in between lanes until the next opening. I followed suit, but with significantly less confidence and a silent thanks to Armin, the Cigna rep who sold me a comprehensive health insurance package for my African expedition. Up to $500,000 or ship me home in a box, whichever comes first.

I had given up on trying to figure out the rules after the first few attempts. Some drivers would slow, but drivers behind them might pull out and pass them exactly where you were crossing. The best option was to wait for traffic gaps, but those were as hard to predict as the waves crashing on the sea wall. So when I spotted some cops parked across from a busy shopping mall crosswalk, I dusted off my “gee shucks” québécois tourist accent and asked them what’s up. “Je ne comprendre pas vos règles ici. Les conducteurs ne sont-ils pas censés céder aux passages pour piétons?”

The cop laughed. “Do you need help crossing?” Nothing like a cop offering to help you cross the street to make you feel young again.

“No, I just want to understand the rules here. This is obviously a crosswalk, but many drivers seem to ignore it. How do I know when it’s safe to cross?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “This is a big city, about 4 million. Where you come from, it’s a big city too?” About 4 million, too, I told him. “But drivers stop at crosswalks.”

He told me that everyone drives in Casablanca so cars are pretty much the kings of the road. Then he repeated the offer of helping me cross. After all that, I didn’t want to tell him that I didn’t need to cross. So I nodded yes and watched the cars slow and stop for the cop in uniform helping the sixty-something Canadian across the road.

You don’t want a lift from one of these..

⚜ ⚜ ⚜

I put together a short clip of what’s it’s like to use a crosswalk here. Please forgive the bobbling camera work, I was concentrating on not getting run over. I also didn’t want to press my luck by doing more than one take. My apologies to my friend and faithful subscriber, Sharon Cheema, who gets car sick watching wobbly video.

⚜ ⚜ ⚜

Morocco has been working to reduce the number of traffic fatalities, which last year totalled 3,685. They are hoping to get it down to 1,900 by 2026, half of the number of traffic deaths from 2015. One of the reasons for high fatality rate is that the number of vehicle went from about 2 million to 4.7 million from 2004 to 2020, according to the International Transport Forum of the OECD. One can only imagine that this also meant a lot more inexperienced drivers on the road.

Morocco’s fatality rate at 18 deaths per per 100,000 population is more than double Canada’s 5.8, but it’s actually lower than the global average of 18.2 and the continent of Africa’s 26.6.

All this to say, you need to abandon your North American traffic sense when navigating the streets of Morocco. If you can’t find a cop to walk you across the street, follow the flow of other pedestrians, or look for one of those rare crossings with traffic lights.

Thanks for keeping me company on, and off, the road.

A rare set of traffic lights complete with pedestrian traffic signals.