Ok, so as many of you who know me know, I am realtively critical of drivers in the States. Well, I'd never think I would describe Albuquerque drivers as calm and sedate, but compared to what we experienced on our trek between Kraśnik and Gdańsk and back again, I would have to say it's true.
Most of the motorways/highways are only two lanes (one each direction), and people travel vastly different speeds. The convention is to drive on - or at least partly on - the shoulder if you know someone is trying to overtake you, but in many cases the overtaking driver isn't patient enough, so they'll just swing out into the flow of traffic in the other lane, double-, triple-passing, or worse (sometimes with other drivers - often more than one - following them), basically running both lanes of traffic off the road in the process, sometimes at ridiculously high speeds. Couple that with sometimes braking furiously to avoid head-on collisions and slipping back into traffic in the right lane, it is incredible there aren't more accidents.
Add to this the fact that the truck drivers will compeltely hog the road, basically unnecessarily, the constriction of traffic basically encourages erratic driving, passing and the like. It's like they enjoy making things worse instead of better. I was literally in disbelief at some of the maneuvers I saw. Between trying to keep what I considered a safe distance and being seriously tailgated at 120+ km/h, and just trying to keep focused on the normal driving experience, it was pretty stressful.
The one thing I'll say is that at least they use their blinkers. Very few drivers spared the use of them, and it did help immensely. Around the larger cities there are some four and even six lane stretches of road, but they're few and far between, and painfully short. I always found myself wishing there was just a little more road, and another lane or two.
Oh well ! I am glad we did it. I have a newfound respect - generally - for American drivers, and think after this I could probably drive with confidence almost anywhere. It makes "bad" driving in the States seem pretty tame by comparison.
One more little anecdote... We were on a fairly small road that we used to avoid the traffic in Warsaw proper, and it was fairly packed. We're going along a section of road that was really narrow wiothout much shoulder, and literally out of nowhere came this huge Mercedes that was going 300 km/h if he was standing still. Really, I don't think I've ever seen anything not on a track going that fast, and he was barreling down, straddling the center line, in between two lanes of traffic. Amazing. If he'd have hit someone, it would have been so ugly. At least nobody would have lived long enough to know what happened.
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