Bubba Elvis XIV wrote:So finnish driving discussion again...
My present pet hate (and it's damn stupid) is people deciding to beat you on the overtaking...you do all the stuff, indicate etc etc and as you start to pull out some knob beats you to it at 150 km...And there's never a copper around. But god they're there when you ride your bike with out a light in Turku.
Envy, yeah..."Damn, that guy is gonna get home 30 seconds before me"
Highly f@cking stupid.
I guess it's easier to observe and catch a bicycle than a car going 150 kph.
Driving in Finland is so
personal. Unfortunately it's becoming more personal in the U.S., too, with a growing incidence of road rage and other forms of hostility or competition. But for the most part (with a few localized exceptions), the driving culture has always been one of the best things about the U.S. (And you won't often see me use "best" and "culture" in the same sentence when talking about the U.S.) Traditionally it has been completely impersonal and unemotional, like walking among the sidewalk pigeons in a big city. Nobody gets angry at the pigeons for being in the way. They're just there and you wend your way around them with a bit of mutual cooperation to avoid collisions and cross-contamination. In the U.S., drivers have traditionally regarded the other cars much like pigeons. Historically, if you have put on your blinker for a lane change, the other cars have opened space for you -- rather than closing up the space so that you don't insult them by pulling in front of them, the way it happens in Finland. (Or Chicago or Nashville or NYC.)
That's changing somewhat now. You see more of the Finnish-style driving. For all I know it may be European-style driving, though I didn't see as much of it living in Sweden. Now even though it's changing in the U.S.,there are still a lot of drivers who are cooperative to a fault. Instead of following the letter of the law, these drivers will wave you to go first, even though THEY have the right of way. There are a couple of problems with this. One is that they don't realize that sky reflected on their windshield sometimes makes their hand gestures invisible. Another is that arbitrarily changing the agreed procedures can create confusion and even accidents. There is no ambiguity at all in the rules regarding who proceeds in what order at a 4-way stop. It all has to do with a combination of who arrived first and who is to the left/right of whom. A private hand-signal agreement between two drivers, invisible to others or unobserved by them, can cause a third driver to proceed at the wrong moment and get into an accident.
My wife failed her first driving test in Finland because of a single mistake: she slowed down a bit on the moottoritie to make room for a car on the on-ramp to merge in. By her description, it just made the most sense at the time because the other car was a little bit ahead and almost on the highway, so it was a smaller adjustment for her to make way. She learned that from observing me, of course. She was
supposed to pay no attention whatsoever to the on-merging car, the inspector told her -- even though that would require THAT car to slow down a lot to enter BEHIND her, meaning that car would enter the moottoritie at a rate of speed well below the surrounding traffic.
In general, in the U.S. we're taught to be cooperative and impersonal when driving. More than that, we absorb it by observation when we're growing up. To then drive in Finland, where every interaction with another vehicle seems to have a winner and a loser, is roll-your-eyes irritating.
Yesterday my wife was sitting at a red light and got bumped from behind. As she was getting out to inspect for damage, the other driver pulled out and sped away, missing her physical person by a couple of inches. In Atlanta, most of these incidents are perpetrated by unlicensed illegal immigrants (according to the police), though in Cheater Nation it is becoming more common for ordinary citizens to behave in this way. Fortunately there was no structural damage. The paint damage was inflicted by the fleeing of the driver, not by the initial impact. At many intersections, a camera would have recorded the whole sequence of events, but this was not one of those intersections.
As driving culture goes, so goes Western civilization. Prospects are looking dim.
), felt like Burt Reynolds in those cannonball run movies because got whole blue and red lights, sirenes etc. behind me and was not far from being handcoffed 
...none!!!
