VISITORS to Jeddah this Summer Festival season are advised to look again at the junk on the city's roads. Some of the dumped vehicles could be gems. For example, the Blue Ford Custom 500 (above, right) was an icon of luxury made available at an affordable price in 1965. Now it can be viewed in a northern back alley just off the Palestine Road flyover crossing Madina Road and perhaps got for a bargain – a running model costs about SR7,500 ($2,000) on e-Bay. Every year roughly 10,000 new passenger cars are registered in the Kingdom where motoring at chaotic peak hours is largely a survival sport. Otherwise, driving is very much a leisurely pursuit fueled by the low cost of oil in the world's biggest producer of crude. As new models arrive, older ones are often junked and eventually forgotten, ending up as museum pieces depicting perhaps a culture of plenty spilling over on the city's roads. However, not all the junked cars are left by the wayside due to excess: most of the them are too wrecked for repair at a feasible cost. According to Traffic Department statistics, a person dies every 60 minutes in a car accident in Saudi Arabia. The report also states that Saudi Arabia spends SR13 billion annually on car accidents and SR734 million on medical care for victims of car accidents.
