I feel like it's a trope of moving, everyone has to comment on everyone else's driving. Either the drivers where you just moved are terrible, awful, the worst, or the drivers you just left are horrible, dangerous, unbelievable. Or people make other equally untrue and outlandish statements: in Utah, where my parents live, some folks swear up and down that all the bad drivers in town are immigrants from some other state (not in my experience) while in South Carolina, all locals maintain that the bad drivers are tourists (also not true, in my experience).
Add in foreign travel, where the rules of the road are different and in some places people drive on the other (not wrong, by the way!) side of the road, and the number of complaints seems to expand exponentially. I have been guilty of this myself: when I visited Taiwan in high school, I was convinced we were going to die each and every time we got on the road. Yes, our bus did get side-swiped once and yes, we were taken to a very shady area by a seemingly narcoleptic taxi driver who then left us there, presumably to be fallen upon by thieves had not another taxi driver swooped in but really, the traffic there was probably just as bad as any major city anywhere but certainly worse than I knew, given that I didn't have a driver's license at the time and had never driven a car in my life.
So I get it, I do, drivers are bad everywhere. I totally, completely get it. Really! Qatar doesn't even rank in the top 20 countries with the most traffic fatalities (though my experience here has me seriously questioning how the data that ranks those countries is even gathered, let alone how accurate it is!)
BUT sheesh, omigosh, aaahhh, the driving here is aggravating, horrendous, often incredibly frightening, and sometimes life-threatening! Why, you ask? Well, for one, roundabouts. ROUNDABOUTS!
Now, I know the rotaries are the norm in many countries, and I am not knocking them in principle, but I am against them as they manifest themselves here. You see, there are, as hard as it may be for Americans to believe, actually rules with regard to proper roundabout usage. In fact, one might even call them laws! Also in fact, the state of Qatar might call them laws and does in its little driver
instruction manual, but in actuality, roundabouts in this country are lawless circles of death. I am not kidding. There are roundabouts on either side of my house, so I have to pass through them no matter where I go or take tiny, unmapped back roads (and I do this a lot, trust me). One is bigger than the other and it's an oval, for some reason, so it's even more difficult to maneuver than the others. But the problem is not the roundabouts, per se, it's the conduct of the drivers in the roundabouts.
For the uninitiated, in a three lane road entering a three lane roundabout, the middle lane is for drivers who are going to continue straight, the left lane is for drivers who are also going straight, turning left, or making a u-turn, and the right lane is for drivers going straight or turning right. Very straightforward...sort of, but there are signal rules that go along with the lanes which should, SHOULD make it very clear what everyone is doing and where everyone is going. In theory. In reality, I was in the middle lane the other day and someone in the inside left lane decided to drive across my lane with no signal and no warning so I slowed and moved a tad but not too much so as not to move into the path of the guy on my right and I glared at the first guy...and heard a huge boom and a crash! It takes me a second to realize that I am hearing the aftermath of an accident, but I didn't feel anything, so I get out of the car and find that the guy behind me had swerved and slowed down to avoid all of us and our shenanigans and then he got hit by an SUV who was going around on the outside of all of us to muscle his way in on the right. The poor man yelled at me "You!" while throwing his arms out wide in a clear gesture of disgust and then he yelled at the last driver in Arabic, and I decided that since I wasn't actually technically involved in this accident, I was going to hop in my car and move on (because worse than traffic is dealing with the Qatari police after an accident as an expat, trust me), tremendous adrenaline surge notwithstanding.
Something like this seems to happen half the times I enter a roundabout. Because of these experiences and the general lawlessness on the roads here, I live in a constant, highly attenuated state of stress throughout all the driving I am doing. Sometimes I find myself gritting my teeth unconsciously while driving or even while thinking about getting ready to drive anywhere. I have reinforced an old rule with the boys "No loud or sudden noises in the car!" because I just can't handle the disruption to my concentration. Knowing that the boys are buckled into booster seats and are far safer than most of the other kids around us and that my uber-defensive driving makes us all far safer than many of the other cars around us is only small consolation.
I will get used to it, I know I will! I do have days of Zen in which I don't even really notice the roads or the time spent on the road. I often feel very accomplished that I got my license so quickly and that I can find my way around my quarter of the city without maps already. I know all of this. But some days it's a teeny, tiny bit hard to remember!
Add in foreign travel, where the rules of the road are different and in some places people drive on the other (not wrong, by the way!) side of the road, and the number of complaints seems to expand exponentially. I have been guilty of this myself: when I visited Taiwan in high school, I was convinced we were going to die each and every time we got on the road. Yes, our bus did get side-swiped once and yes, we were taken to a very shady area by a seemingly narcoleptic taxi driver who then left us there, presumably to be fallen upon by thieves had not another taxi driver swooped in but really, the traffic there was probably just as bad as any major city anywhere but certainly worse than I knew, given that I didn't have a driver's license at the time and had never driven a car in my life.
So I get it, I do, drivers are bad everywhere. I totally, completely get it. Really! Qatar doesn't even rank in the top 20 countries with the most traffic fatalities (though my experience here has me seriously questioning how the data that ranks those countries is even gathered, let alone how accurate it is!)
BUT sheesh, omigosh, aaahhh, the driving here is aggravating, horrendous, often incredibly frightening, and sometimes life-threatening! Why, you ask? Well, for one, roundabouts. ROUNDABOUTS!
Now, I know the rotaries are the norm in many countries, and I am not knocking them in principle, but I am against them as they manifest themselves here. You see, there are, as hard as it may be for Americans to believe, actually rules with regard to proper roundabout usage. In fact, one might even call them laws! Also in fact, the state of Qatar might call them laws and does in its little driver
instruction manual, but in actuality, roundabouts in this country are lawless circles of death. I am not kidding. There are roundabouts on either side of my house, so I have to pass through them no matter where I go or take tiny, unmapped back roads (and I do this a lot, trust me). One is bigger than the other and it's an oval, for some reason, so it's even more difficult to maneuver than the others. But the problem is not the roundabouts, per se, it's the conduct of the drivers in the roundabouts.
For the uninitiated, in a three lane road entering a three lane roundabout, the middle lane is for drivers who are going to continue straight, the left lane is for drivers who are also going straight, turning left, or making a u-turn, and the right lane is for drivers going straight or turning right. Very straightforward...sort of, but there are signal rules that go along with the lanes which should, SHOULD make it very clear what everyone is doing and where everyone is going. In theory. In reality, I was in the middle lane the other day and someone in the inside left lane decided to drive across my lane with no signal and no warning so I slowed and moved a tad but not too much so as not to move into the path of the guy on my right and I glared at the first guy...and heard a huge boom and a crash! It takes me a second to realize that I am hearing the aftermath of an accident, but I didn't feel anything, so I get out of the car and find that the guy behind me had swerved and slowed down to avoid all of us and our shenanigans and then he got hit by an SUV who was going around on the outside of all of us to muscle his way in on the right. The poor man yelled at me "You!" while throwing his arms out wide in a clear gesture of disgust and then he yelled at the last driver in Arabic, and I decided that since I wasn't actually technically involved in this accident, I was going to hop in my car and move on (because worse than traffic is dealing with the Qatari police after an accident as an expat, trust me), tremendous adrenaline surge notwithstanding.
Something like this seems to happen half the times I enter a roundabout. Because of these experiences and the general lawlessness on the roads here, I live in a constant, highly attenuated state of stress throughout all the driving I am doing. Sometimes I find myself gritting my teeth unconsciously while driving or even while thinking about getting ready to drive anywhere. I have reinforced an old rule with the boys "No loud or sudden noises in the car!" because I just can't handle the disruption to my concentration. Knowing that the boys are buckled into booster seats and are far safer than most of the other kids around us and that my uber-defensive driving makes us all far safer than many of the other cars around us is only small consolation.
I will get used to it, I know I will! I do have days of Zen in which I don't even really notice the roads or the time spent on the road. I often feel very accomplished that I got my license so quickly and that I can find my way around my quarter of the city without maps already. I know all of this. But some days it's a teeny, tiny bit hard to remember!
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