“My car fits. Doesn’t that make it a parking space?”
“It looks like a parking space.”
“Oh. You mean this is a sidewalk?”
“If I park here in the road, when I come out I can just put the car in gear and go.”
Not ALL Italians are on foot, bike or metro! Seattle cops would meet their yearly budget if they were giving out tickets here for “improper parking”. Sometimes I’m walking along and just crack up at the creative parking I see. This would NEVER go over in the U.S.! But I guess it’s an understood system and it seems to work for everyone and so it’s OK. (It still cracks me up.)
Side note: Stop sign? I’ve figured out that, for the most part, they’re there to establish right-of-way and fault in case there’s an accident. People don’t actually stop. Not even a “California Rolling Stop”. There’s a particular stop sign in the city when I’m heading southbound out to the bike route… Cars go even faster through that intersection than if there were no sign. One day, a northbound car (with the right-of-way) approached the intersection at the same time a southbound car and I did. I realized very quickly that I’d better stop because Mr. Northbound wasn’t going to! The southbound car slowed just enough to make it all work. (In the very center of town, there’s more adherence to signals and signs, but it all seems to be a very loose, squishy system.)
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Amazing, and yes very funny too. In Asia traffic is even worse – lanes mean nothing. However many cars and especially scooters can edge up to the light, they’ll all squish in. Usually that means three cars in two lanes, with a pack of 20 motor bikes at the very front. Dangerous too… you see several dead vehicles on the side of the road every day. Is the driving in Europe as nerve-wracking as it looks?
Being either a driver or a passenger in China is an opportunity to die every day. (That’s probably true anywhere, but the odds seemed vastly multiplied in Xi’an, China.) And if you’re a pedestrian in China, say a prayer to your ancestors, be attentive, then GO!
Scooter drivers here say their commute times are cut in half. I asked “why?” when they were driving the same route as in a car. Because they do the same thing as in China: they zip forward to the furthest available physical space in or near the lane, then launch ahead when the light turns green.
By the way, in all the photos I posted here, the cars are parked. None of those are stop-action shots of moving cars. They’re not traffic shots, which would be a wild blur of a chaotic mess.
And, no, I have not driven in Italy, and don’t really care to, thank you very much.