The Commuter Files
CF/01/00

There is one word for it - fun - that describes driving in Brunei ; lush green jungles, meandering roads, picturesque hills and shorelines. 

You can gun the engine in the straights, and hold your breath as you negotiate the many and furious corners. In short - spectacular. The downside to all this scenery is to be part of the scenery - thanks to a shortsighted driving style that is fast becoming the epitome of a Brunei driver. 

The term road bully however hardly applies to the Brunei driver. Its more of a "Look ... I'm stuck to your rear end while you're doing 60!" and "Whizz ... see Halim zig zag through traffic on the way to work ... then wham see Halim slam into a car with the nice old man inside ...and kapow, see the nice old man give Halim a great right hook!"
Although such scenario is very rare, a highway knock in Brunei may be fatal. With a population of less than 300,000 crammed into slightly over 5000 sq km ensures that almost everybody knows everybody else. ... so you'd better not mess with my third cousin twice removed.

This fascination with speed on the other hand is best demonstrated by the many corners on the road. Corners and the act of cornering (unabr) seems to be destined to be a national past-time and preoccupation cum hallucination. The challenge to young people (and not so young people) nowadays is to negotiate corners with as little braking,or no braking as possible while jamming the accelerator down to 150 km per hour. Succesful negotiations almost always lead to further negotiations with other corners, eating away the tyres in the process and perhaps causing one or two mishaps as the driver sees fit.

Everybody commutes in Brunei. About 200-300 km separates the capital of Bandar Seri Begawan from the oil town of Kuala Belait. That boils down to approximately 2 hours of travel time from one end of the country to the other (excluding Temburong).

For instance, here'a a typical day in the life of an office worker who lives in Tutong but works in Bandar Seri Begawan, about 100+ km away.

  • 0745am - Work Day Begins
  • 1200 - Lunch
  • 0130pm - Work Resumes
  • 0430 - Work Day Ends

Commuting takes roughly 20 minutes at approximately 120km from Tutong, or 10 minutes at 240km or 5 minutes at 360km per hour. So select your speed and arrange your waking up hour in the morning accordingly. That's about sums it up on the state of commuting in Brunei. You see a blur of colour on the highway as these drivers whiz by desperate to come to their offices early. You get the occasional Kaboom as the drivers decide to make an abrupt, unscheduled and albeit an unwarranted stop on top of the divider after fliping 720 degrees over something that resembles another whiz.

Pardon the dramatics ... this is what commuting does to the imagination. It dulls the mind and sharpens the probabilities;

Commuting in a nutshell - a very small nut shell.....
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