It’s tough getting around in Kyiv these days. Tonight at around 22:30, I was turning into the lot to park my car, my left signal blinking, doing about 25 klicks on the right side of the road. The lot is well-lit and you can’t miss that there’s a gate there.
But just as I began to turn a sharp left, a funky yellow Zhyguli swung around me to try and pass.
It looked like there were at least four people in that car, probably a family. And they were about to plow into the side of my car when I blared my horn. The driver, a chunky middle-aged guy in a sweat-stained t-shirt, shouted something out his window as the duty guy at the parking lot opened the gate to let me in.
Where was that guy going in such an all-fired hurry, late on a Saturday night? There were probably three other very tired people in the car with him. Judging by the time, the car and their clothes, they were coming back from a day spent at their dacha outside Kyiv, digging potatoes in the sweltering heat.
But he was ready to put all their lives (and mine) on the line, just because someone was moving too slow for his liking.
There’s been a lot of this lately.
The city has been assaulted with construction since the spring, and the tempo is only worsening. Everybody’s working on an August 24 deadline. Much of downtown Kyiv is barely passable. And every day some new intersection is crowded with construction vehicles tearing up the paving, ripping out streetcar rails, redoing sidewalks, laying down sewage lines, rolling asphalt, and generally making a mess of things for commuters.
Sometimes an area is shut down to traffic altogether and fences go up. As often as not, there is no clear detour to get where you want to go. And there’s never any advance warning so that you can take a different route in the first place.
Sometimes it all happens in the open without any clear markings. You can drive right between the tarring machine, the roller and the orange-clad construction workers, and no one will stop you. Cars are getting gummed up with tar, splattered with pebbles, dusted with sand. Wheel-rims are taking a punishment going over manholes that stick up as much as six inches out of the ground. In places, even the best slalom racer couldn’t wiggle fast enough to dodge them all.
The traffic lights at some major intersections have not been on for nearly three weeks. And you can count the fingers on Django Rinehart’s bad hand, how many times a cop has been there to direct traffic.
No, the cops prefer standing near their car about three-quarters of a block away, in the other direction, hoping to catch people in some minor violation. Since they can’t collect directly anymore anyway, you wonder why they bother.
But if you ask me, 90% of the trouble in Kyiv right now is not the roadworks, but the drivers.
On bad days, gridlock has traffic backed up for two long blocks going east and west along one major street I use, right in the middle of the afternoon. All because no one wants to yield.
Sometimes the drivers in one direction have decided they’re on the LA freeway and two legal lanes of traffic suddenly turn into five, covering all four lanes in both directions – plus the sidewalk.
Yet the lanes going beyond the intersection are often empty. I know, because twice I got out and walked, after waiting 15 minutes inside a cab.
Worst of all, it’s the average joe drivers who are meaner than rattlers now. There are more aging Zhygulis full of people tearing around aggressively, passing everything in sight, and pulling manoeuvers that threaten the lives of all those on board. These are the cars kept together with a rubberband and spit (nobody prays much here). The ones whose front axle could break after going over a one-inch pebble.
It used to be the fancy cars you had to worry about in Ukraine. Those with the black windows and special license numbers. They’re the ones who would swing into the oncoming lane to skip the line waiting for a green light. Who would cut in front of all the traffic and shoot across an intersection while the light was still red. Who would drive on sidewalks, cut anyone and everyone off at the drop of a hat, and tear across the paths of pedestrians without even a glance at what was on the road.
Everybody knew, if they hit one of those Black Marias, they’d end up with the bill. So everyone stayed out of their way. The way people in Chicago used worry about hitting one of the ghettomobiles driving around with half its innards falling out. You knew they didn’t give a damn, so you gave them a very wide berth. And they were King of the Road.
What’s weird now is that the kruti drivers in black have largely backed off. They’ve probably seen a few costly fenderbenders lately and they’re not so keen to get their chrome scratched in a situation where it’s going to be tough to act mean and aggressive.
I mean, you’re going to look like an idiot, standing in the midst of a 50-car gridlock, making like you ate nails for breakfast at someone who dinged your bumper. Especially if all the other drivers feel mean enough to eat nails breakfast, lunch and dinner.
They say that tough times make tough people. And when things go bad, you see people for what they really are.
Just the other day, for the first time, I saw drivers yielding the right of way. One after the other, around the four directions. Real smooth-like. The next day, of course, it was gridlock again.
But they’re learning.•
– from the notebooks of Pan O.
No comments:
Post a Comment