What?
Drive in Rome?
You must be CRAZY !!
YOUTH MOTORWAYS JUNCTIONS ROAD-ETIQUETTE WHY? POLICE
In Italy, a motor accident could happen anytime,
anywhere and there would be nothing you
could do about it, because people are disgustingly
dangerous drivers here. You are fifty times more
likely to die on the roads in Rome than
you are in London or Los Angeles.
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.
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.
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?
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!
On the motorways (freeways) people cut
in on you
from the inside, or even from the hard shoulder,
or overtake you with inches to spare, thus nearly
forcing you off the side of the road or into the
armco. A lot of people die this way.
Sooner or later they will kill me or my children
or other innocents, with their stupid dangerous
blindly-uncaring driving tactics. I cannot
understand why people should drive like this!
It’s insane! And grossly antisocial. And the
police do nothing by way of prosecution or
prevention.
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. People shoot out
from sideroads in front of you as if the
likelihood of another car approaching on the
main road was out of the question. It's weird!
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 if
you do the right thing, you are in danger.
I feel like the victim of a torturing psychopathic
bully - If I resist the despot I'll be punched,
if I succumb to his regime, he'll punch me
anyway. It's a No Win situation.
Imagine 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. Now imagine
that while you’re waiting, a stream of five or
six cars come whistling past your right-ear,
driving up the kerb to get into the side road
ahead of you. That’s what they do here.
I don’t understand how they can
gamble
with their lives like this. It may be some
ingrained fatalism of nominally devout
(is there such a thing as nominally devout?)
Roman Catholicism - ‘Que sera sera’, 'What
will be will be' - including motor accidents!
I just don't get it.
Every single car exhibits a prang of
some
description, as collisions great and small are
everyday occurrences, taken for granted as
just part of life's rich tapestry here.
All in all it’s an expensive place to drive,
the highest cost being human life.
Goodness knows how the insurance works.
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.
There are no rules and the police enforce
none, 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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