drybeer wrote:There's a whole load of these on YouTube - there's some savage impacts there and an APPALLING standard of driving...
Also WTF is it with the 8 lane carraigeway roads with NO CENTRAL BARRIER or median strip? No wonder there's so many head ons?
And the pedestrian accidents look pretty fatal - horrible!
I've experienced driving in Russia (a number of taxis in St. Petersburg and a personal driver in Moscow). Those 8 lane motorways with no median strips are utter madness. If there's no traffic ahead on one side, everyone on the 'busy' side just moves over into the oncoming lanes. But everyone has the same <beep> car so overtaking isn't exactly brisk. So this becomes a kind of chicken/bully mentality towards the less busy lanes. The first time I saw it, I produced a number of involuntary arse pellets harder than diamond, our taxi was in the third lane overtaking and then all of a sudden there's a wall of traffic heading towards us, 7 motherfucking lanes of it! The taxi driver just calmly cut up the car next to us and fell into the inside lane with everyone else on 'our' side of the road. Chaos.
Another thing. While I was staying with a friend in Moscow (I had use of his personal driver, it made life waaay easier), I'd noted a number of cars (always large German luxobarges), with Starsky & Hutch style magnetic blue lights stuck on the roof and pulling outrageous manoeuvres in front of traffic cops, parked up on footpaths like they were abandoned, speeding through stop lights. So I asked my mate if they were some sort of secret police or some <beep>, he said "Nup. They're civilians and you can buy one of those lights, they're all registered to the government at $10,000USD per year". Me=
"...so you buy one of those and you're above the law?". My mate, "Yep".
A couple of days later I saw a Merc S500 with two blue lights on top, one each side, so I asked my mate what that was all about, he said "status mate, he's got so much money he can afford two of them, and now everyone knows it".
In all my travels I've witnessed such an amoral society... and I loved it. Mental place.