Saturday, 30 August 2014

Sporadic Driving Skills



Drivers in this little island haven’t quite got the hang of the rules of the road, perhaps because there are so few of them. Roads, that is: there is one running up the spine of the island, and spurs run off that to various coastal villages. There is also one, the busiest, from the main harbour town up to the Old Village at the top of the hill.

There used not to be many drivers either, but there are a lot more now and in the summer one has to contend not just with Greek drivers but also (horrors) with Italian ones.

Drivers here have special difficulty with the idea of driving only on one side of the road. The authorities tried painting a white line down the middle of some parts of the roads, but this actually made matters worse: drivers assumed it was just a handy steering-guide and one was supposed to try to keep the line between one’s wheels.

The most recent idea was, for the last hundred yards or so of the Harbour – Old Village road, where things often went badly wrong, to put a row of posts about half a metre tall down the middle of the road.

The photograph below speaks for itself:

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