The Ring Road Ecosystem

Having to spend at least 2 hours a day on the Ring Road everyday for around 2 years now I've reached the conviction that the Ring Road isn't just a normal motorway people spend hours stuck on everyday, its an Ecosystem...Just like sunk ships that end up supporting all sorts of marine creatures, the Ring Road supports all sorts of parasites that live off of the cars stuck in the infinite trip between its ends.

Once the traffic jam starts, and usually that's a less than half a kilo meter from the entrance of the ring road, you start seeing them, street vendors, selling everything starting from pastry to cigarettes and everything in between. Their number fluctuates depending on the severity of the traffic jam, but there is always at least 10 of them. Walking between the cars with their trays, selling stuff to the drivers be it trucks or normal cars everybody buys from them, after all if you spend a good portion of your day stuck in that stretch of road you might as well buy things to snack on and drink while there, they serve a purpose and have this symbiotic relationship with traffic. The same people are there consistently so you can tell that they've made a career out of it.

Another type of people living off of the Ring Road is beggars. As you progress through the ring road you see them, completely veiled women (montakebat) begging between the cars, some of them pushing a kid on a wheel chair. Obviously at some point someone figured out that this model works, and so several people repeated it, as a result we ended up with 3 identitical beggars, the three are dressed in the same way, their faces are covered so you can't tell who is whom and the three of them are pushing kids on a wheeled chairs, if you are going to beg on the ring road you might as well be original, i mean if you are going to do it every single day in the same spot for a couple of years, people are bound to figure out that you are fake, you need a new model, especially when people start copying it, whats the chances of having three women in need who happen to be all veiled and have a kid who looks the same being pushed on the same type of wheeled chair, and obviously they know and coordinate with one another I've once seen the three of them sitting together, chairs parked one next to the other and the kids where playing! In plain sight of the people driving on the ring road everyday!!

Later on the day and during the drive home  and on the other direction of the ring road you see another type of street vendors, as it gets hotter they start selling beverages out of dirty blue barrels and in plastic bags with a straw in obviously unhygienic but they must be making a healthy profit or they wouldn't be there everyday, and of course another type of beggars appears essentially they are the same veiled women but this time they have incense or equally invaluable items in front of them.

Obviously these people are well organized, no two people sell the same thing and I've never seen them fighting which doesn't seem natural unless they have reached a certain agreement or they all work for someone or somehow reached which is a lot more likely. They serve a need and have a symbiotic relationship with traffic, a friend of mine has this theory that they are actually causing the ringroad traffic jam as people slow down to buy from then buy I personally don't think that's correct, however I know that they'd hate to see the ringroad flowing unjammed. As for the beggars I think they are only their cause someone is stupid enough to give them money which makes pushing that wheeled chair up to the ring road lucrative enough to do everyday. People if she is fit enough to push that chair all the way to the ring road she is fit enough to work, also I don't think that kid is hers and if he was hers he'd better be taken away from her. Think about it you are a pious Muslim woman with a handicapped child and u r out if means does pushing your kids wheeled chair on the ringroad all day begging for money sounds logical?

I however dont think that its all their fault, they just found a need and they are filling it, if they were removed by force others will just take their place, and playing a game of hide and seek with them on the ring road doesn't seem possible, as a matter of fact if you arrest them all other's woud replace them the next day, after all you dont need anything more than a wheeled chair, a veil and a sickly looking kid and you are set. however if people stop giving them money or even better if somehow a mechanism is found to provide them with jobs that they can make a living out of they'd just stop doing that, after all walking the ring road all day, you wouldnt mind doing any job that requires a minimal skill level and actually produces something that can add to the national GDP.