Driving, Parking, and Tickets

The rule about parking seems to be that any place is fine as long as you don't get towed away. This particular picture is of a corner . The car on the left is on one street; the one in the middle has pulled up onto the corner; the car on the right is on the cross street. Apparently if you park in the wrong spot though, the car is towed. My sil spent 6 hours rescuing hers the one time the powers-that-be decided she had parked in the wrong spot.


Two interesting cars are the Volga, the car that important people drove during the Soviet period, and the lada, a cheaper car which apparently had a tendency to break down. Apparently new purchasers of a lada took the car right from the dealer to the shop where the mechanic installed all the parts that didn't make it on when it went through the assembly line. The quality now is supposed to have improved.

Driving is also a little different than in the states. First I will link a video my brother sent me a couple of years ago. This is taken by the tunnel videos in the longest in-city tunnel in the world, Lefortova Tunnel. Apparently it runs under water part of the way, and there are leaks which cause black ice on the road underneath the tunnel when the temperature gets below minus 38 C. While I was searching for that video on youtube, I came across this one. I didn't see very many acc-dent s here, but this video gives a good example of what the driving is like. (My brother says it's too tame.) American drivers would have a problem here, but it's part of the Russian culture, and the Russian drivers are used to it.

During our monastery tour our driver got tired of waiting in traffic and pulled up over the curb onto the walkway in the median. On the other side of the median, some students from the army school were racing. The driver pulled right into the middle of their race trying to get over the other side, interrupting a race. When he decided he couldn't get over that curb, he sped off down the walkway until he reached the end of the walkway where he pulled back onto the road.

On the way to the Kva Kva Water Park, we saw a lada coming the other direction. The sign next to us said that it was 340 meters to the intersection. When the lada was almost next to us, he stopped and then backed up quite quickly, dodging both cars and pedestrians until reached the corner where he pulled up on the curb and parked.



Kristen and I were invited to the water park where Jessi's friend Christopher was celebrating his 15th birthday. Monica, Kristen, and I, followed by Christopher's mom, Erline, were heading to the metro station to pick up the kids. Traffic was horrible, worse than usual, because people were heading out of town to their dachas since the next day was a holiday. Right before the metro stop, Erline took the wrong turn, going onto the bridge rather than underneath to the metro. We almost missed it, but with a little maneuvering, we made it under the bridge to the metro. It would have taken Erline about an hour to loop back because of the heavy traffic, so all 9 kids crowded into the back of the small Toyota. It was a little tight but quite memorable.

My brother told me about one time he was going to the airport and running late. The driver was complaining that my brother should have been ready earlier. Then they reached a point where the traffic was backed up for about a kilometer, and it was obvious that they would not make it in time. The driver did a u-turn into the other lane. Instead of finding a different route as my brother expected, he backed up all the way to the light and the did another u-turn, thus avoiding the entire traffic snarl.

Tickets are another interesting thing. Tickets are paid on the spot, and you pay the police officer. If you don't have any change, he's happy because he gets to keep it all. So for example, if you get a 200 ruble ticket but you only have a 1000 note, your ticket will cost 1000 rubles. Tickets near the center of Moscow are more expensive (1000 rubles, approximately $40) than further out (300 rubles, $8) because the policeman has to pay more to get that post. A police stands at the side of the road at a corner flagging people down with his stick as they turn the corner. Further out of town, the fines are negotiable, and one policeman even offered to take my brother's pen instead of money for a ticket.

We saw an ambulance several times with the siren on stuck in traffic. People totally ignored the siren, and the ambulance had to wait like everyone else. We even saw people cutting it off. Murray mentioned that he saw injured people or dead bodies at accidents far more often than he had in the US, and we decided that the wait time for the ambulance was probably the reason why. Of course, it might also have something to do with the crazy driving and the fact that seatbelts aren't required. Pedestrians also have to be more careful since cars don't stop for them. The one vehicle I almost walked into was an ambulance; Monica grabbed me in time. If I had to walk into something, it might have been the right one although I do not hear good things about their medical system and did not want to try it out.