- What Cezanne did for apples, Rob Whitworth does for city traffic. His short videos of big Asian cities — Shanghai and most recently Kuala Lumpur — make what for me (a Manhattan boy) are the boringest, ugliest, most useless parts of cities — the traffic clogged streets — oddly beautiful. He must have grown up in L.A., I decided. But when I looked, it turns out ... no, he's British. Go figure.
From this NPR Piece
Oh, but he missed the most beautiful part, which is admittedly hard to film. Everyone in VN dons ponchos while driving during a downpour and the common practice is to drape the front of the poncho over the front of the scooter. People told me it kept a rider drier, but I didn't find that to be true. Anyway, once the sun goes down or if it's really black under those rain clouds, people turn on their headlights. The light shines through the material of the poncho. If you're lucky enough to pass by a rotary (roundabout, traffic circle, whatever) when this happens, it looks like a river of multicolored paper lanterns. Also, that was pretty low traffic and in the nicer parts of the city to boot. Traffic jams in HCMC can be shoulder to shoulder, tight enough that elbows can touch, just barely inching along for more than a klick.