Driving

[cjsmith]

A friend posted some travel impressions a few days back, and I am reminded of one of my own, about driving. My travels have given me the theory that there are two distinct and mostly disjoint sets of driving skills. These are:

1) Always Drive by the Official Written Rules, and If Everyone Else Does Too, then Thou Shalt Survive: the United Sates and western Europe and the like. Any place with painted lane lines is a major Rules environment.

2) Look Around, Plan Ahead, and Do Not Blink, and Thou Shalt Survive: Cairo, for example, and cities in China, and I'm guessing India as well.

My experience so far is that people are good at one or the other of these things. Many Rules people will strongly castigate the Look group for being "bad" drivers or "unsafe" drivers, because the Look folks lack the only skillset a Rules person can imagine is important. Some Rules folks will start an argument over this paragraph alone. The certainty that there is One True Way runs deep. Conversely, I would not be hugely surprised to find Look folks thinking Rules drivers are frighteningly unsafe.

By the pitiful standards of Rules countries, I seem to be high on the noticing axis. I "see into the future" by looking around. The more you notice, the more you can predict. Very often, when I'm a passenger with a friend driving, I see something develop... I imagine what I might do in response... then I see something else develop... then I see a couple other potential good moves... and my driver glances in the direction of the first something and flinches. I probably saved my left side from some messy injuries by seeing this begin to happen early enough that I could slow a lot and move over a lot before I got hit. So I do notice stuff. Essentially, though, I know I'm a daughter of a Rules environment.

I'm remembering a cab ride in Cairo wherein I noticed a situation developing -- a bus starting a U-turn or something like that -- maybe a quarter mile down the street past a writhing teeming sea of other vehicles and pedestrians. Hard on the heels of my noticing that, I saw that my cab driver was moving in what was obviously a good tactical response. That meant he had noticed the situation itself before I did. I have never in my LIFE ridden with any other driver who I could tell, just by watching what he did, had noticed something before I did. I was big time impressed.* I know he probably wouldn't do well if he were suddenly dropped in Sunnyvale, but I knew darn well he had me outclassed in Ma'adi.

I had the piece of paper legally allowing me to drive in Cairo, but I didn't do it. I won't drive in any place where the system is Look Around until I get a heck of a lot better at Look Around. But at least I've figured out not to try to use Rules.

*Note: I bet a dollar lrc notices way way way more than I do. Way more.

Comments

[allanh.livejournal.com]

#2 applies in Sunnyvale, too.

Heading north on El Camino Real and making a right turn into the Rite-Aid parking lot (next to Safeway) is definitely a Look situation. More often than not, I have to perform avoidance maneuvers when people in the center left-hand-turn lane try U-turning or left-turning when they don't have the right of way.

Randy occasionally goes "mmmm..." at me when I'm driving, but he has a lot more faith in other drivers' knowledge of and willingness to adhere to the Califonia Motor Vehicle Code than I do.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Sure, #2 definitely applies here. There's probably an extent to which #1 applies in Cairo. It's stunningly clear which one predominates, though.

When someone breaks the Rules, Looking can often avoid an accident. Yet in a Rules land, drivers who are paying no attention at all to anything but themselves -- while following the Rules -- are usually considered perfectly safe, even admirable drivers. To me, these two statements do not go well together.