Archief - Rijgedrag in België?

Math'ke zei:

Of als iemand langs rechts voorbij steekt als je eventjes 130 rijdt op het middenvak is het ook 9/10 een vrouw ..

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night ghost 128 zei:

Is er één land waar ze deftig rijden?

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Math'ke zei:

Of als iemand langs rechts voorbij steekt als je eventjes 130 rijdt op het middenvak is het ook 9/10 een vrouw ..

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bartreligion zei:

Italië

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night ghost 128 zei:

Is er één land waar ze deftig rijden?

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menlor zei:

Als ge uw rechts zou houden en niet middenvaksrijdertje speelt kan niemand rechts voorbij. Dus blijf rechts rijden als ge plaats hebt.

Daar erger ik me dus meeste aan dus ^^ rustig te cruisen en dan moogde van 1ste naar 3de en van 3de naar 1ste omdat er weer eentje vertikt om rechts te rijden, maarjah

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bartreligion zei:

Italië

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driving in rome
part one
some general thoughts...

death race 2000 -
roman drivers are killers

[...]

And now, back to the main topic of Italian driving conventions...

Some Italian road accident statistics - The weekend before last there were 1500 motor accidents on Italian roads, which included 80 deaths. Of course, death isn't always the worst thing that can happen to a road accident casualty; Legs can be lost. Arms, noses, genitalia. Eyes, teeth. Tongues. Braille is learnt. Children never walk again. Etc etc… 80 deaths out of 1500 accidents doesn't mean that 1420 people simply got up and walked away does it?
This weekend there were only 40 deaths. Next weekend, who knows? A regard for the normal habits of road safety is curiously absent in Italy. These were not bank-holiday weekends. Just normal Saturdays and Sundays. Happy little bands of Italians all whizzing down the freeway in their customary fashion - Never using the rear-view mirror, never wearing seatbelts, never giving turn-signals, never leaving more than two car lengths of space between them and the car in front, not even at 80 miles per hour. Never slowing down in the rain. Always overtaking where the road-markings say not to. Always cutting in on you too soon after they've overtaken you, always letting their babies play, un-strapped on mummy's knee in the front seat, always talking on their mobile phones while overtaking. And always dying in their cars, in this tiny country, about fifty of them each weekend, and maiming a few hundred more while they're at it.
On the motorways (freeways) people cut in on you from the inside, or even from the hard shoulder, or overtake with inches to spare, nearly forcing you off the side of the road or into the armco. Sooner or later they will kill me or my children or other innocents.

You are fifty times more likely to die on the roads in Rome than you are in London or Los Angeles.
One preferred method of death on the roads in Italy is to simply mow down pedestrians. One famous incident a couple of years back involved a bus full of people which swerved off the road after approaching a bend too fast. Nobody was hurt, but the bus was slightly damaged so all the passengers got off the bus to look at the damage and marvel that they were still alive. Seconds later, another vehicle which was also approaching the curve too fast simply drove into the group, killing nine of them. This was the classic Italian road-death scenario - pedestrians meandering unheeding in the middle of a road and a motorist driving too fast and probably not even looking in front of him at the time anyway.


why is it like this?

The four main points of highway safety can be summed up as 'Don't speed', 'Look where you're going', 'Be considerate of other road-users' and 'Try and make at least some use of the smidgen of intelligence you were born with because human life is precious'. Italians however have demonstrated with all the weight and credibility of a scientifically controlled experiment that they don't give two hoots for these life-saving guidelines.
We don’t understand how they can gamble with their lives like this. It may be some ingrained fatalism inspired by Roman (and we stress the emphasis on 'Roman' here) Catholicism - "Que sera sera": "What will be will be" - including motor accidents... It appears they have never been taught that there is actually a way to travel by motor car without it being a matter of luck as to whether you reach your destination in one piece or not.

This then is how Romebuddy introduces our section on Driving in Italy. We have always enjoyed driving, but after moving to Italy we were so petrified that we almost gave up completely, and it took over a year to conquer enough of our fear of Roman driving conditions and begin to venture out alone on the main Italian highways. Even now we still often refuse to be driven by an Italian, having confidence only in our good British selves as drivers.


disadvantages for tourists

As far as getting around Rome goes, driving is really the most boring method for the tourist anyway, as the city's roads are hopelessly congested and poorly surfaced, so you'll spend a lot of time in traffic jams, and more time trying to avoid hitting anything than looking out the window at the sights.
italian driving instruction

As I write, there’s three teenagers in a car in the street outside, teaching each other to drive. There’s no L plates (P plates here, indicating a learner driver) and I doubt if any of them are even provisionally licensed. The police do nothing about such things. Fourteen year-olds can go out on mopeds without a helmet, and take a pillion passenger. They die like flies. It’s weird. It’s such a contradiction to the culture which places so much adoration on its children, yet they care nothing for their safety.
True to Italian bureaucratic craziness, on the evidence, Italian driving instruction and the national driving test appear to involve no emphasis at all on safe driving methods. Instead, driving licences are awarded following successful completion of a written examination which tests the candidate's memorisation of the regional code letters used on car registration-plates.

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driving in rome
part two
a few survival tips...
never take your eyes off the road in front

Not even for a split second. When driving in Rome, you'll find that cars regularly pop out of side-roads ahead without allowing you sufficient braking distance. I think they assume you will simply move over and overtake them, but of course this is not always safe to do so. Cars also slow down and stop in front of you with no advance signals of this intention and often with no apparent reason.

expect the unexpected

Nobody would ever think of overtaking on a blind curve would they? Unless they're Italian… Road safety isn't their strong suit.
Just when you think it's safe to look down for a moment and put that cassette in the player, a car could be hurtling towards you on the wrong side of the road. I saw this happen twice just this very morning when I went out for a five minute trip to the shops - In the first instance I was waiting behind a bus which had made a scheduled pick-up stop on a blind hairpin corner on a 1:5 downhill grade and the solid central white line ruled no overtaking permitted. Nevertheless, a Mercedes came sailing past both me and the bus. Further down the hill, on my return trip, the problem of an awkward y-shaped intersection of three roads has recently been 'solved' by the Highways Department by not building but simply painting a roundabout on the road. Thus it is no obstacle to drivers such as the one who nearly drove into me as he approached the junction on the wrong side of the road, veered left at the roundabout (instead of the mandatory right) and finally sped across the centre of the roundabout itself, needless to say without giving any signals of his intended course.


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five little tips -

Don't use your rear-view mirror much - for reasons given above, you just can't afford to take your eyes off the road ahead for long.

Give clear turn-signals. Nobody else does, but that's why they're always crashing. If you've ever wanted to make a difference in society, this is your big chance.

Watch out for parked cars. Italian drivers rarely signal that they are moving out into traffic from a parked position. Take nothing for granted.

Drive slowly. Okay, we know it's a drag, but as the risk of collisions is so great in Rome, the slower the impact, the better.

Wear your seat-belt. Again, Italians will think you're a real wimp, but a large percentage of Italian road deaths are from head injuries against the windshield in relatively slow-speed collisions. Around town you will often observe cars with a tell-tale splintered patch on the windshield where someone's head flew in at 40 mph in an earlier incident. Is it worth the headache?

honk your horn a lot

In England we think it's a bit rude to honk at other road users - Rather bad form. It's noisy and it insults their intelligence - we place the onus of responsibility on the other driver or pedestrian who may not be looking where he is going, and usually in England or the States people are looking where they're going, so we don't actually need to use the horn much. In Italy however the onus is more on you the driver to warn other road-users of your presence. To Italians it seems to be quite normal and even forgivable to be meandering in the middle of the road and not looking where you're going. But you who were minding your own business driving steadily along on a main road could be considered culpable for not hooting at every approaching side-road and pedestrian - It's as if the right of way is not actually the right of way, and your passing car is the last thing people expect to see on a main road. It almost seems to hark back to the beginning of the last century when by law a man had to walk in front of an early motor car waving a red flag to warn of its approach; Yet another subtle illustration of the Italian 'crisis-management' methodology, instead of using good manners, good will and a simple but effective book of rules to stick to.

on roundabouts...

give way to traffic coming on to the roundabout ahead of you. They have right of way, and therefore come racing in in front of you. This is a ludicrous European law, not in fact exclusive to Italy. Essentially it defeats the purpose of a roundabout (to keep traffic flowing quickly and safely through a busy junction). What tends to happen is that you get traffic backed up on the roundabout while it waits for a stream of incoming cars to enter the ring ahead of it, so the whole thing grinds to a halt, and fights break out over who should give way, given the reality of the system not actually working.

And because most Italian drivers know that the continental roundabout system doesn't work properly anyway, and because Italian drivers by nature don't like yielding to other traffic, they don't bother to give way at all on roundabouts, whether they are on or off it, resulting in complete anarchy. The finality of it, is that there are no rules. When approaching a roundabout in Rome, you frankly do not know what to expect, or how you should proceed. Even if you do stop to give way, whether on or off it, cars behind you will honk their horns or simply drive around you with black looks of utter disdain because you dared to stop in front of them and impede their own self-important progress for three seconds.

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driving in rome
part three
the biggest problems...

when being overtaken -

Be a hero - or more precisely, stick to truth, justice, and The American Way. In other words, don't budge from the middle of your lane. Remember, we're not talking about motorway driving here - The road safety tip we're about to advise does not apply to six-lane carriageways - Obviously we don't mean you're to stay at 40mph in the outside lane of a motorway. No, we're talking about normal two-lane highways here. Let us explain: After nearly three years of observation Romebuddy has concluded that most road accidents in Italy are encouraged by a major design fault in highway construction - THE ROADS ARE TOO WIDE!
Each single carriageway is wide enough so that there is in fact just enough room to overtake the car in front without needing to cross the central white lines into the opposing-direction carriageway. This sounds good in principle, but in practise is of course highly risky when another car coming from the opposite direction is also using this extra space in his lane to overtake.


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Although both overtaking cars are still technically on their own sides of the road, they in fact pass each other with only inches to spare, and, given the general sloppiness and recklessness of Italian drivers, they often collide during this manoeuvre, usually at high speed. Deaths are involved. This overtaking technique is also dependent on the car that is being overtaken moving over tight into the kerb to give the overtaker room to get past. Romebuddy has two objections to this - First, highway maintenance is abysmal in and around Rome (and most of Italy in fact). This means the highway edges are usually full of debris (fallen tree-branches, road rubbish, old tyres, rubber pipes, oilcans, cigarette packs, and, because of poor drainage, often large deep puddles as well). Being forced into the edge, obviously you'll hit this stuff or aquaplane on a deep puddle and probably crash that way. Secondly, if the car overtaking you panics about whether he really does have enough room to get by or not, he will cut in in front of you, (they cut in on you anyway, whatever the circumstances, it's normal Italian overtaking etiquette to overtake even if there's hardly room for another car in front of you) forcing you to brake, or move even further to the side. As you're already as far over as you can, you've no place left to go - Another wipeout in the making…
The worst thing of all about this method is that cars will often overtake two-abreast - One is overtaking using the spare outside space in his own lane, the other will be 'conventionally' overtaking on the outside of him, using the opposite (oncoming traffic) lane on the other side of the white line. Obviously this is a major recipe for disaster. If an oncoming car just around the next curve is also overtaking using the single-lane method… Well, it doesn't bear thinking about does it. But it happens here - All the time. Given the width of the roads, the 'triple-overtake' is also sometimes seen; Four cars side by side, a moving wall of high speed steel stretching from one side of the road to the other. Romebuddy suggests prayer.
We also wonder why new roads in Italy continue to be built this way, when designers must surely know that this is how the extra road width will be used; suicidally. Italy is actually quite densely populated, so is this a government conspiracy to keep the population down?
What's the remedy for it? It's as we said - be a hero and don't move over for anyone who wants to pass you in the same lane. You'll know when someone wants to pass you, because they'll flash their lights and honk their horn behind you and generally try to climb into your trunk. But don't give in. Hold your position in the middle of the road and don't move over for them. They won't like it, but tough! If they wanna overtake you they're gonna have to learn to do it properly, which means waiting for a safe space in the oncoming traffic and taking the responsibility of using their own skill and judgement to use the opposite lane to pass in. Overtaking should only ever be at the risk of the overtaker. The Italian method however transposes half the risk onto the one being overtaken. And I for one am not gonna take that rubbish. By refusing to move over you will be helping to save everyone's life, not just your own. But by moving over you become party to the concoction of a dangerous scenario.

traffic-lights at night

The coup de grâce of Roman civic road management is that the city actually TURNS OFF THE TRAFFIC LIGHTS in central Rome after midnight. This is allegedly to save money. (but not lives, we note) so instead of red and green, the traffic lights simply display a flashing amber. To negotiate such a junction, you have to slow down, watch carefully for a gap, and just hope for the best. Some of these junctions are pretty fast and hairy. And if there's an accident, who's to blame? What precisely would the legal position be? Does anybody in Rome care? Astonished? We are.

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driving in rome
some final eccentricities

flashing headlights

When driving in Italy, don't flash your lights to indicate you will give way to other traffic. In Italy this means the opposite to what it does in England.
In England, when we want to give way and wait to let another car go first at junctions and whatever, we flash our headlights at them. Ninety-five percent of the time a flash of the lights in England means - "Go ahead neighbour, it's fine with me - You first please, I'll just wait here a moment until you're done".
In Italy though, flashing headlights means the opposite. It means "Get the heck out of my way, I was here first!"

This is unfortunate because it means in practice that as a driver in Rome you are left with no vocabulary of drive-craft. I've observed many occasions when a small time-consuming traffic jam at a busy road junction in Rome could have been avoided by logical management of the problem by the drivers involved; by a simple combination of adherence to the basic highway-code concerning right of way priorities and the use of flashing headlights to tell each other who can go first. In Italy though, because flashing lights means the opposite, they have no way of communicating "you go first" to another driver, so an impending traffic-jam can only ever be handled confrontationally, and will often result in angry exchanges and even collisions as the drivers have dictated a culture with no sign-vocabulary available to them with which they could have avoided the situation in the first place. In assigning only a meaning of hostility to the flashing of headlamps, they have at a stroke denied themselves a method of communicating submission, apology or well-meaning friendliness to other road users. It does not take too much imagination to realise that this little quirk of Italian driving politics is symptomatic of a trait in the broader makeup of Italian culture. Italians tend to be impatient and adversarial rather than trusting and conciliatory and have little faith in the ability of rules or government to administer justice and civic order - hence their election of a new government, local or national, on average, every ten months, and their refusal to acknowledge the existence or relevance of the highway code or any other laws framed for their own protection.


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road markings

You won't find many painted on the roads in Rome. Italy is one of those countries which believes that the wider you paint the white lines at a stop junction, the more serious it is to stop. A thin line is only for wimps to stop at. Hence there are colossal wide stop lines painted on the roads in Rome, though most of them have been rubbed out by high-speed braking skid marks so are largely ignored. As few drivers take any notice of road markings, local councils and highway departments rarely bother to paint any - it's just money down the drain to them. This means that most road junctions are a free-for-all fight, with no-one having the slightest idea who has right of way. But just as a rough guide, we can offer you this titbit of information - deep down in his heart, every Italian believes that he alone has right of way...

italian traffic cops


Okay, now get this - It's 9.15 pm on Saturday November 6th 1999. On the Via Aventino in central Rome I was driving along and suddenly see the aftermath of a motor accident - I draw closer and see that a police car is involved. I get a little closer before I can see the other car the police car collided with. Guess what? It's another police car! Both cars are write-offs, their front ends are crushed in - A head-on collision between two police cars on a busy city street - Getting the idea about Roman drivers now? if that's how the police drive, what can you expect from the civilians?
The police just stand there posing with their leather jackets, guns and sunglasses, pretending that they’re American ‘cops’ and randomly pulling in people for no good reason at all, just to make a show of it.
Whatever may be framed in the written laws of the nation, in practice there seem to be no rules, none that are ever enforced by the police anyway, except when it suits them, such as when some kid on his moped shot out and literally rode underneath a friend of mine's car recently - the traffic warden instantly wrote my friend an on-the-spot fine of fifty quid! Probably because he knew the local lads would have beaten him up if he’d only fined the kid. It’s appalling.

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driving in rome
oh no! - not more problems !?
child safety on italian roads

Baby/child safety-seats in cars are a rare sight. Babies are instead bounced on mummy’s knee in the front seat while daddy weaves in and out down the ring-road at eighty miles an hour. The other day I saw a man riding a scooter along a fast main road with a small child sitting behind him, and an even smaller tot (perhaps a two-year-old) standing on the 'floor' of the scooter in front of him, holding the handlebars. None were wearing crash-helmets! Here's a picture we snapped on Via Quattro Fontane of another happy family group also employing this practice:

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junctions and merge-ramps

The Great British T-Junction as we know it is almost non-existent here - all the junctions are ‘merges’, (ramps) but the length of the run-in is never enough. Sometimes it’s a sort of three-way merge. I am afraid to go out on the dual carriageway or the GRA (Rome's M25 or beltway), as I cannot see how to avoid colliding with someone at the merges can be achieved by any other way than pure luck. I’ve thought and thought how it can be done safely, but cannot find an answer. At least once a week I see the aftermath of a shunt on one of these merges, and the faster roads out of town are dotted with bunches of flowers every couple of miles as tributes marking where people have died. It’s weird. They remove their brains and get into their cars.
There are numerous local B-road junctions where not a single white line is painted on the road, or Give Way (Yield) sign erected, so people just whizz into it and hope for the best. They never give way.
And nobody signals. And nobody ever thanks you for moving over and waiting for them if the road is narrow.
If you assume the correct road-positioning at a junction and are waiting patiently for a gap in the on-coming traffic, people just whizz past you on the inside because they think you’ve broken down or something - Thus, even when doing the right thing, you are in some danger.
When turning right (left in America) into a side-road, and waiting to give way to traffic coming towards you before you can make the turn, a stream of five or six cars may come whistling past your right-ear, driving up the kerb to get into the side road ahead of you.


car parking in rome

There are very few car-parks, (as we would understand that term) in Rome. The only proper one I know of in central Rome is a very large underground multi level one beneath the Villa Borghese park. As a matter of fact, it's so enormous and badly designed and signposted that returning from an afternoon at the nearby zoo, for the first time in my life I couldn't find where I'd parked my car in it. Not because I couldn't remember the approximate positioning of my car, but rather, because I wasn't aware at first that there was actually more than one level to it.
Actually this car-park is quite a long way from anywhere useful, except for the Zoo, the Gallery of Modern Art, and, on the Via Veneto, Harry's Bar.

There is only a pathetically small open car park in front of Termini Station (where, on top of the mandatory municipal parking fee, you will also be pressurised by obnoxious gypsy women into paying protection money for your car), and another near the Via Veneto, so you may as well learn how to park on the street in Rome -
But be careful where you park - In Rome the roadsides are not painted to indicate no-parking zones (ie, double yellow lines as in England). Instead they merely use signs on poles at sporadic intervals and it's up to you to figure out where the no-parking zone begins and ends. If you infringe, you'll get a ticket and maybe even towed. From year 2000, Rome has doubled it's 'vigile' (parking wardens) force in a drive against illegal parking in the city, so watch out, even in the suburbs.

There are no parking meters in Rome, but sometimes there's a 'pay-and-display' permit machine you have to use, and you can also buy parking permit scratch-cards at Tabacchiere. These tickets, either from the machine or the Tabacchiere, allow you to park in any spaces indicated by grids of blue lines painted on the roads.

Parking prices range between 80c and €1.50 per hour for any of the above parking methods, (ie in a car park or on the street).

You can also 'park and ride' (as we say in England) or 'parcheggi di scambio' (as they say in Italy), in open carparks near some major subway stations in the suburbs. This is much cheaper, at about €1.60 per day, but of course, you're nowheer near the centre of town, and you still ned to take a subway ride.
If you do get a parking fine and you don't believe it was fair, pay it, but also write a stiff but polite letter of complaint to the city police department (the address is on the ticket), explaining fully why you think the fine was unwarranted. You may or may not suceed in getting a refund or apology, but the important thing is to make the complaint, as native Romans themselves rarely complain properly about anything and will take any rubbish that Italian bureaucracy hands out. But if enough people start to complain, perhaps things can be changed.
Don't expect to find your car in the same condition as when you left it. While it was parked, someone will most probably have driven into it, needless to say, without leaving you a note saying sorry or leaving a phone number. There's an age-old myth that says Italians are in love with their cars. This simply isn't true, not in Rome anyway. Every single car exhibits a prang of some description, as collisions great and small are everyday occurrences, taken for granted as just part of Italian life's rich tapestry.
All in all it's an expensive place to drive, the highest cost being human life, lost on a regular basis. Goodness knows how the insurance works. premiums must be prohibitively enormous.

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EagleEye zei:

Er bestaat voor veel mensen blijkbaar een ongeschreven regel dat de middenste rijstrook voor de 'snellere' auto's is, en de linkse rijstrook voor de 'snelste'.

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TeOtWaWkI zei:

Op de 1ste 120? Is dat niet truckcountry?

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TeOtWaWkI zei:

Op de 1ste 120? Is dat niet truckcountry? En ik heb het dus over overdag rijden...

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ComputerVISTA zei:

Duitsland! Hand on hart... Dat rijden de mensen imo het beste van gans Europa.

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night ghost 128 zei:

Om één of andere reden kan ik dat niet echt geloven.

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