Tehran: A City That Never Waits

A few days ago, I saw a video on Instagram showing a man in his mid-20s sitting in a car, playing both the student and the driving instructor. The exchange was absurdly funny — and painfully accurate for anyone who has ever driven in Tehran.

“How do you change lanes?” the student asks.
“You don’t,” the instructor replies dryly. “You create one.”
“If the light turns red?”
“You look both ways and go anyway.”
“And if someone honks behind you?”
“You honk louder.”

It’s funny because it’s true. Driving in Tehran is not a commute; it’s a survival sport. It’s intuition and defiance performed at sixty kilometers per hour — a kind of civic improvisation where the rules are more like rumors.
I remember sitting next to my father as a boy when he was driving down Valiasr Street — the long, green artery that once ran both ways through the heart of Tehran, the longest street in the Middle East. Back then, Valiasr was lined with tall sycamores and filled with honking taxis, bicycles, and patient pedestrians. Today, it’s one-way, reserved for buses, with motorcycles buzzing through like hornets. Watching my father steer between lanes, he turned to me and said, “This is how we survive here.”

He wasn’t wrong. Decades later, I’ve come to realize the road tells the story of the nation. Tehran’s streets aren’t just traffic jams — they’re a mirror of who we’ve become: restless, resourceful, suspicious, endlessly improvising.

Driving here is an act of distrust. Every car assumes the worst of the next. The horn has replaced conversation; signaling feels like a sign of weakness. And yet, somehow, the city moves — endlessly congested, rarely still. Chaos, in Tehran, isn’t a flaw. It’s the system.

​Tehran has taught its people to adapt — not heroically, but habitually. When the government fails to provide clean air, we buy purifiers. When the taps run dry, we call the tanker. When the internet slows to a crawl, we stack VPNs on top of VPNs.

A friend once joked that Tehranis could rebuild civilization from spare parts. He wasn’t exaggerating. We’ve learned to live around the system, not through it — much like the government itself has learned to live around the sanctions, though at a painful cost to society.

When I was living in Tehran for the second time, in the mid-2010s — when optimism was at its height for sanction relief and the nuclear deal — my American friend who was visiting me asked my motorcycle guy, Reza, about a tangle of wires hanging from an electrical pole near Tajrish. “How is this even working?” he asked. Reza smiled and said, “It’s not. It’s surviving.”

Tehran’s resilience has long been its pride — the way people wake up, work, cook, dream, and laugh despite everything. But I’ve often wondered when resilience turns into resignation. At what point does enduring become the trap?

Tehran, like Beirut — a city I visited a few years ago with a friend — holds two worlds on top of each other. North of Parkway (if you can call it an expressway given the horrendous traffic), the skyline glitters with towers, boutique cafés, and foreign cars. Some of these towers now rival Midtown Manhattan in their price per square meter, symbols of a surreal economy where wealth and struggle coexist side by side.
South of Shush Square, mechanics and vendors fight for inches of sidewalk, selling spare parts, old SIM cards, and patience by the kilogram.

One side of the city drives imported SUVs; the other drives Peugeots that belong to another century. The absurdity isn’t the contrast — it’s how normal it feels. We’ve learned to speed through inequality the same way we speed through intersections: eyes forward, one hand on the horn.

Just a few days ago, I was on FaceTime with my friend — he’s seventy-three and still zips through the streets of Tehran on his red Vespa. As he passed the site of an old cinema — now a fast-food restaurant — he turned his phone so I could see. I watched in silence from thousands of kilometers away and quietly asked myself: Why do people still stay here?

It wasn’t cynicism. It was affection. Because despite everything, Tehran still pulses with life. It tests your patience but never your imagination.

When I was younger, I used to believe that one day the city would change — that the lights would turn green and stay green. Now I think Tehran doesn’t really change; it just adapts. The city keeps moving forward, but the destination stays the same.

When you stop believing change is possible, adaptation becomes an art form. That’s the paradox of Tehran: a city forever in motion, rarely arriving anywhere new.

Driving in Tehran is a metaphor for modern Iran itself. The roads are jammed, the lights unreliable, but the people — ingenious, impatient, alive — find a way through. And yet, every day that improvisation continues, the collective sense of trust wears thinner.

We call it survival. We call it endurance. But maybe what we’ve truly mastered is the art of lowering expectations — and still calling it hope.

I’ve lived in many capitals and major cities across Asia, Africa, America, and Europe. As I write this, I live in Lisbon — another city with its own beautiful chaos of drivers, which I’ll write about someday. But Tehran — with all its noise, its contradictions, its resilience — remains my favorite city in the world.
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Because even in its madness, it reminds me what it means to move forward — without ever learning to wait.