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IS ANYONE SAFE OUT HERE?! That was my first thought as I got back home last night after yet another crazy week of commuting here in Moscow, Russia's capital.
I should add a little bit of qualification to that question. As a foreigner of six years' residence in Russia, I have only recently begun to drive here. My wife passed her driving test last year and we decided that we would purchase a small car. Thanks to the fact that she is Russian and - more importantly - a Muscovite, this was a relatively painless procedure. I won't even go into the amount of paperwork of hassle that I would have had to complete were I to try and do it by myself.
And so we began to drive out here ourselves. Now, whilst I passed my test back in 1995, I haven't really driven very much; due to a combination of living at home during my university days, having seizures at inconvenient times, and then - once I became seizure-free for long enough - not being able to afford a car. So this year is really the first time in the last 14 years that I have been able to drive for an extended period.
On the roads of Britain, one can generally predict how a driver is going to behave in a given situation. Not so here. Plus, there are so many more cars - alright, it is the capital city of the country - but whilst ostensibly there are rules of the road, trying to keep to them is a daily challenge. I drive about 15km per day from our apartment just outside the city centre to my school in Yasenevo (just next to the MKAD; most famous as being the home to the KGB headquarters in Soviet times). I drive down three roads, maybe passing through about 10 sets of traffic lights, but I have certainly become much more reliant on my mirrors than I ever was in the UK.
Every day is an adventure. For a start, there is the 'hierarchy of size'. I drive a Peugeot 107, which means that I am somewhere near the bottom of the ladder. BMWs, Audis, Jaguars, Range/Land Rovers etc are given priority due to their size and cost. Then there is the hierarchy of colour. Light blue - forget it. It's black or nothing. If you want to make serious progress on Moscow's streets, you need a black Mercedes with blacked out windows. Image is everything.
Manners, unfortunately, tend to go out of the window. Brits tend to have very good road manners and it's something you don't really appreciate until they aren't there. Russians haven't learned that little touches such as NOT pushing in, or driving up your exhaust pipe, or blaring their horns incessantly at you because you've decided to stop at the zebra crossing, are not really appreciated. And the lines on the road are not respected, especially at traffic lights. It's push, push, push, drive around to get in front of the car at the front, drive around to get in front of the car who's just pushed in front of the car in front.
Coming home from school - especially, when it's much busier - I have seen some horrific accidents. In the last week there were two Zhiguli cars that had obviously been going so quickly and smashed into each other so hard that there was no glass left in the windscreen or front windows of either one. Likewise, the dents just defy description - especially on the cars that are still moving!
Lastly: the traffic jams. There is a law that if you crash into another car, the vehicle(s) cannot be moved until the GIBDD (State Inspectorate for Security and Protection on the Roads) have been to make a report and photograph the incident. Consequently, depending on the size of the vehicle(s) involved, the road may have a considerable blockage. In the last two weeks, I've sat in jams for 30 and 45 minutes apiece just to get past a car - and then continued on my way.
Fancy an adventure? Come and drive in Moscow!
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