Fundamentally we in the US are rule followers.  We form lines and expect others to do the same.  Nowhere is this more evident than on our roads and highways. Traffic rules, signage, and markings on the road all mean something and we pay attention and obey these meanings.  Sure New York city is a bit crazy, Los Angeles can be a parking lot, and Houston a speedway but in general wherever you are in the US you can pretty much expect that most everyone is playing by the same well understood rule book and there are few surprises. The lines painstakingly painted on our roads mean something. There are lines that delineate traffic lanes, for example,  which define invisible walls determining where your car should remain.  It is very rare to find someone driving down the center of a lane line, simultaneously taking up two lanes.  The center yellow line which divides the direction of travel, likewise represents a “no-go” zone and is not to be crossed.  The markings clearly define when it is permissible to cross the yellow line, as in the case of rural roads to pass a slower vehicle. The rules here,too, are well understood and involve a certain etiquette – one that most people follow.  If you are the passing vehicle you put on your blinker and speed up.  if you are the vehicle being passed you slow down so that the passing car minimizes the amount of time in the opposite traffic lane.

Another example are left turn lanes, markings  which define the line that is formed to make a turn across an intersection.  At traffic lights in the US cars line up in one neat single file line in the well marked left turn lane and (generally) wait patiently for their turn to get through the intersection.  It is all fairly orderly, even taking into account the aberrant  and obnoxious behaviors that are seen now and again on the road.  In the US the portion of the population who ignore the rules of the road, while evident, is actually fairly small.  You realize this when you travel out of the country and witness the mayhem that defines the norm on roads elsewhere.  Russia and India are two countries that come to mind.  I will deal with Russia first and India in a subsequent post.

Typical traffic in Moscow

I have been going to Moscow, off and on, for the last 13 years or so and the every time I have been there I study the traffic patterns, in an ongoing futile attempt to figure out the rules of the road.  The traffic in Moscow is highly entertaining and has gotten more so over the years as more people have access to cars.  I am profoundly grateful that I do not have to drive in it – we have professional drivers that get us from place to place, thank goodness.  I am not sure I would want to negotiate my way around Moscow.  One trip I finally admitted defeat and asked several of our drivers to explain the rules to me.  I commented to them that the only common rule I could determine after years of observation was “what is behind you does not exist” meaning anyone you cannot see is on their own and you have total impunity to do what you want with what is in front of you.  They assured me, repeatedly, that there are rules. But in the same breath it was also pointed out that the majority of drivers probably are not familiar with any rules as they most likely did not take any kind of test, but simply paid some unknown bureaucrat for their licenses.  This information was presented to me in the same kind of contemptuous tone used by professionals everywhere when describing the antics of amateurs.

Driving is a profession in Russia and with good reason.  It is not straightforward at all.  I had been in Moscow for only about a week, on my first trip in June 1998, when I was exposed to how flexible and unflappable you have to be to drive professionally ( or in any capacity) in that city.  We were driving home from work one day and it was, as usual, rush hour.  Our two lanes were moving reasonably well headed into the city but the two lanes leading out of the city to the suburbs were slow and congested, as is the case with any city anywhere at the end of the work day.  We reached a traffic light and saw that in the outbound lanes an accident had taken place right at the light.  As we passed through the light it became quickly apparent that the lanes in the opposite direction were at a complete standstill, and looked to remain that way for some time.   We progressed further into the city.  All of a sudden I noticed that our van driver had moved over a lane, along with all the other traffic traveling along with us into the city.  I looked ahead and noticed that we were now no longer two lanes of traffic moving in each direction but rather one lane of traffic heading into the city and three lanes of traffic heading out of the city.  Apparently some of the drivers headed home, having gotten impatient, decided to move around the stalled traffic via one of our inbound lanes.  The result: there were now three full lanes of traffic at a standstill heading out of the town.  Our lane, the single lone lane remaining heading to the city center was still moving reasonably well but slowed a bit due to the fact we had to merge into a single file line.  Shortly after this all took place, and the impromptu third outbound lane inevitably became stalled as well, another enterprising and impatient driver heading out of the city decided to jump lanes again.

This time however, there was no place for us to go, already having been squeezed into one inbound lane.  I looked with horror at the cars aimed right at us.  Our lane, left with no options, as one, calmly drove up on the sidewalk and took over that expanse of concrete from the pedestrians.  The pedestrians calmly moved out of the way.  We slowed a bit more, but not much.  I was amazed.  There were now four stalled lanes going out of the city and one lane, driving on the sidewalk, moving into the city. I looked around me at my fellow passengers but no one else in the van seem surprised.  In addition there was no emotional outburst from the driver, as one might expect here in the US if someone were forced to go through such machinations.  I was struck by the seeming normalcy of the moment and started laughing because it was so surreal.  That is the point that I started trying to figure out the traffic rules.  Clearly the lines on the road were merely guidelines….

Trying to merge- illustrative of the left turns too!

Another baffling traffic phenomena that it took me a while to figure out was the process relating to left turns.  The streets are marked similar to those in the US, there is a left turn lane for cars to line up in to make the turn.  The issue in Moscow is that people don’t feel that they have to wait in line.  If the line gets too long, which might be only 3 cars deep, then the drivers form another line, parallel to the first one, and sometimes even a third.  So instead of one line of cars making a left turn there becomes two or three lines of cars turning simultaneously once the light changes to green.  The problem arrises when the cars are turning into a single lane, as is often the case.  Three cars start turning together from parallel lanes and somehow during this process have to merge into a single lane as they travel across the intersection to enter the street.  It is chaos, yet it works.  Observing this behavior for years, trying to figure out how they made it work and why there were not more accidents (and don’t get me wrong there are a lot of accidents in Moscow) is how I came up with the generalized rule of the road that I stated earlier: “nothing exists behind you”.  After over a decade of study that is as far as I have gotten, but one thing is for sure, the lines on the road are optional!