It seems that some people think the new expressway in Muscat (linking Al Naseem to Qurum) is a racetrack! I’m glad to see that the R.O.P. (Royal Omani Police) seem to think otherwise!
That expressway was given to the people of Oman as part of the 40th anniversary celebrations in late 2010 and meant to take some of the traffic off Sultan Qaboos Street which was the only highway through Muscat until the opening of this fine highway. It was not meant for punks to “blow off some steam”!
In local papers, the ROP posted the license plate numbers and speeds of people caught speeding on the expressway. NICE! (posted here on the left side in Arabic) In addition, they are supposed to be fined 500 RO and a year of jail time. We’re not talking about a few kilometres over the limit. (By the way, you can go 9 kms over the speed limit without setting off a radar in Oman.) The official speed limit for most of the distance on the expressway is 120 km/h. What kind of person drives 190 kms or more? I’ll tell you what kind. Idiotic. Selfish. Self-absorbed. Wordly. Reckless.
Unfortunately, a lot of people like such attention and think it’s “cool” that they were clocked going at such speeds. There is a lot of smalltalk about whether the car doing 273 km/h was a Lamborghini or a Rolls Royce. It doesn’t matter what type of car he/she was driving. The point is what type of person was driving that car – a reckless one! I personally don’t find anything “cool” or “awesome” about people endangering the lives of others. Once again, way to go ROP!!! 🙂 To read more about the ROP’s crackdown on highway hoodlums, read this article in the Oman Observer. I guess the new song for the 21 offenders will be, “I fought the law and the law won“!
Andy in Oman 