Driving to Kill

Driving in the former Soviet bloc countries is incredibly dangerous, the roads, drivers, police and regulations form a cocktail best observed from a helicopter, tall building or mountain - just no where anyone could possibly drive or kill you by driving into it.

Roads. Safety and flow regulation systems are inconsistent, while approaching an unfamiliar junction you must do more than observe the cars, people and stray animals, you have to work out which flow control is in use there. At one junction in Lublin, the traffic lights are positioned not beside the stop line but on the other side of the junction, and as the side roads are staggered it is not clear where you should stop - and as a consequence drivers frequently overrun the actual stop line into the traffic coming from the right. It has been like that for years, no one in the local government sees it as a problem because it is an unfashionable part of the city. I need not mention the state of the direction signing as I don't think there is a nation on earth where the local planners employ people unfamiliar with their city to test for potentially confusions - and every city is, as a consequence, a nightmare to navigate. Locals genrally know where they are going, signage is always for the unfamiliar and always created by the familiar.

Regulations: Back when I was a lad, most cars had such poor brakes and handling that the only safe road was a very straight one with no other traffic. In those days, in the UK, they still had what was called a 'suicide lane', which was a third lane in the middle of the road that traffic going either way could use to overtake. With a name like that, you can imagine why by the 1970s they had all gone, along with all those people who helped give it its name, except for some places where use of the lane depended on time of day. Here, for most out of town main roads, there are two normal lanes, but on either edge of the road there is a half width lane. If you sit in this half-width lane to let a van overtake, the van still has to cross the centre lane, and while they are going past, someone might be trying to overtake him... If there is someone walking, riding a bike or similar in your half lane, someone overtaking the other way expects you to brake hard and somehow avoid the hazard in the your half lane. Dangerous? Incredibly so.

Police: If you find any, make a note in your diary. In a land where they can make instant fines on the road, the police force should be the richest government organisation. I mean, I could pull over a dozen vehicles on my trip home and bill at least half. I think I should see if they will subcontract traffic policing to me, all I would have to do is fit a few video cameras to my car and cruise the city all day. Keeping 10% of the take I would have a fleet of vehicles and no need to work myself in a couple of years. The saddest thing is that if you have a bump you have to call the police - and not move the vehicles until the police have checked the situation. Yep, seeing bent but drievable vehicles sitting in the middle lane or on a junction waiting for the police is common, and with poor driving on a poorly designed road systems the police spend more time picking up the pieces than preventing problems by forcing drivers to not drive poorly.


Drivers. With poor road safety regulations, ill-thought out traffic flow, and almost non-existent policing, I can see why many drivers become the selfish pigs they are. Driver training is second rate as few trainers have any idea of what constitutes risk even though many surely believe they know everything they need to know. The trainer giving my wife refresher course wanted her to make a clearly illegal left turn across the traffic to enter our estate; he was lucky I was not in the car because, while I do not believe in violence, I would have dragged him from the car and beaten him to a pulp as who knows when that bad habit is going to kill a former student in the future?

Finally, which group is the most dangerous on the road? The young? No, not enough of them. The old? Again not yet enough of them on the road. No, men between the age of 45 and 60, and women 25 to 45. These bad driving men have never had such powerful cars before due to the limited availability in the part, while the bad driving women have been brought up to the belief that there are men's things and women's things, and therefore think you can change lane like you were walking down a street, or sit a couple of metres behind the car in front.

Come to Poland, there is a lot to see and you will not regret it, but just take care if you hire a car.