In Naples you know the tourists because they stop at red lights. Andrew Hamilton reports
A recent front cover of the British motoring magazine, Autocar, had a blurb for an inside story: it simply said "Europe's worst drivers." Naturally, there was the assumption that we Irish were getting this notorious award. But the piece was about Greece and more particularly its capital, Athens.
Surprisingly writer Colin Goodwin contradicted the blurb saying Athens wasn't the worst place he had experienced. "The traffic is certainly survivable," he wrote, "and, in fact, much easier to cope with than Naples first thing in the morning."
Now it so happens that we haven't driven in Athens but being driven there as a front-seat passenger and without any obligation to navigate or find the way, was scary enough. Scariest of all was Naples: Mr. Goodwin is certainly right. In this sunny southern Italian city with a shady reputation, there's no time for fumbling indecision.
Neapolitans go for press-on motoring in its most aggressive and rawest form. Dawdlers who inevitably are tourist or visitors are not easily tolerated. Every chance to make progress is grabbed in the minimum of time and maximum of pace.
Writer Goodwin puts it succinctly in Autocar: "I feel like a ball in a roulette wheel. Because we can't slow down to get our bearings, we get more and more lost."
In 30-plus years of driving in foreign cities, we have been extremely fortunate in keeping physical contact to minimum. The sampling list has included North and South America, Japan and most of the major European cities. There's one exception though, and, yes, it's Naples.
We were on our way out from the city centre to Pompeii in a new Fiat Punto and we did a thoroughly legitimate thing: we stopped at a traffic light which had turned red. There was an almighty noise from behind. A local driver emerged from his car behind, jabbered excitedly in Italian but a few words of English broke through - " Why you stop?" Afterwards we heard that tourists and visitors are easily identifiable: they are the people who stop for the red lights.
In Dublin city, rear-end shunts happen all the time. The cause is usually dozy, less-than alert drivers who persist with the nasty habit of driving too close to the car in front. Keeping your distance should surely have even more emphasis in driver training.
One of our earliest memories of driving advice was being told to treat other road-users at worst like idiots and at best as uncertain and unpredictable. Keeping a reassuring bit of space at the front is vital.
Driving habits in European countries almost conform with our identikit notions of then. The Germans are competent and precise high-speed merchants - their adrenalin is a foot-to-the-floor surge on the excellent autobahn network, a good part of which is still speed unrestricted.
Italians, not just Neapolitans, drive with passion and flair everywhere and it has nothing to do with the vehicle's size or engine power. Fiat 126s and Cinquecentos often seem to have budding Fangios behind the wheel.
The French, in our experience, are a mixture of restraint and aggression. In country areas, the French aren't too different from there Irish rural counterparts, maybe not so slow but very much steady-as-you-go. Parisian drivers, however, are a more awesome lot - like the Neapolitans they work on the "minimum of time and maximum of pace" principle which they apply with the utmost of aggression.
So what's the judgement on Irish driving habits? Not as bad as we think maybe. Peter Aaboe, a leading motoring Danish journalist, did extensive driving here a couple of years ago and he felt there were mainland European countries with worse standards, such as Belgium.
"I think a lot of your driver problems are caused by poorly-built roads," he says. "There are too many bends, too little vision because of high hedges and trees."
Edouard Seidler, a veteran French scribe, has also driven here. He liked us because we "didn't show too much aggression." Presumably he meant not too much blowing of the klaxon!
ARE these foreign observers being just a trifle polite? After all, we do have many bad habits. Driving too fast is an obvious one but what about going too slow? All drivers have come across a posse of cars and other vehicles forced to crawl behind a slow-moving car, sometimes but not always driven by an elderly person. That could be the scenario for mayhem when someone gets impatient, jumps out of line and is confronted with an oncoming vehicle.
In Aaboe's Denmark, as in the other Nordic countries, motorists are obliged to use their lights at all times and this means driving with dipped lights during the day. Here, when daylight hours are often dark and gloomy, we show a marked reluctance to switch on. In the old days of the dynamo half a century ago that would have been prudent, but the alternator, which gives continuous charge to the battery, changed all that.
The good news is that we should all be behaving somewhat better by 2007 with the completion of 900 kilometres of motorway and high quality dual carriageway as detailed in the National Plan. Better behavious on better roads is expected to save 50 lives every year.