Driving in Spain

As you should all know if your good enough to read my blog, I acquire a car recently. It´s almost a month since I bought it, and I spent two weeks driving at Madrid. I guess it´s time for me to tell you about driving at Spain.(I won´t talk about driving on the right side for you english people, as it´s a perfectly known matter).

I had driven at Galicia since I got my license, so my knowledge was restricted on how we Galicians drive. There´s much to tell you about that matter, but I´ll focus on the differences I percieved between Galicia and Madrid. But also there´s some differences between my old town "Pontevedra" and any others.

The first thing I noticed and also probed in the last two weeks it´s the lack of using "intermitentes" (the lights you use when you want to change your direction to tell other drivers your intention, sorry for not knowing the proper word for them). There´s a big difference between small towns and big ones. On small towns you use them (except on roundabouts, even when you should), but on big cities you don´t. The reason, or at least my believe, is on big cities you have a lot of different lanes where you should be if you want to go to different places while on small towns there´s normally just one. You change the lane in wich you´re in so much you finally stop using them. But it works for all the people that lives there as they´re aware of it. Beware of you poor country boy.

There´s also some more differences between small and big towns, but they´re mostly related to speed. At Pontevedra the fastest you could drive would be on the "ribiera"(as my father calls it) where there´s a 60 Kmph (35mph+-) wich allows you to be at 80 or 90 Kmph (in Spain we have something called the rule of the 20%, wich applies to speed measures and is a legal term that allows everybody to be at a 20% more than the speed limit because of the imperfection of the machines, wich is totally false as those can measure your speed with a 99,9% accuracy, but it´s legal, so you do it, and also as all the speedometers on cars lie about 15kmph allows you to be at 30% more of the limit). But on big cities as Madrid there´s a lot of motorways and your speed average gets over 90kmph (unless you´re on a traffic jam, wich happens all the time).

The bigger difference I got between Galicia and Madrid is about how drivers react to our actions. The people from Galicia is known for being bad drivers, but I don´t believe the topic. It´s hard to happen you´re beeped when you do something wrong at Galicia but at Madrid it happens even when you hadn´t. It seems people is aware of everybody doing the wrong thing, so they beep just in case it happens. I mean, the other day I was getting into a lane, I had to stop if there were cars coming, but instead of reducing my speed I did as I always do, I mantained my speed wich wasn´t too high to be able to see if they were cars coming and if they weren´t or if they were slower than I I would be able to enter the road without much disturbances for myself and other drivers would come behind me, I believe that´s the way it should be. But as soon as I saw two cars coming and was prepared to brake they beeped as their lives were in danger. There was much more than enough time for me to brake and for them to do the same, but they beep anyway. After that I realized it happened all the time, as they were used to people doing bad things on cars ( I hope you get what I mean). Since then I watch carefully for other drivers reactions and noticed they always expect you to be wrong. In some ways it´s better than not doing it, but for myself it´s quite annoying as it sounds they don´t trust me as a driver.

Driving at Madrid could be quite stressful for some people. They change the lanes everyday (the mayor is doing big changes, just look on google for "Madrid", "carreteras" (roads) and "Gallardon" (The mayor)). Even my GPS navigator get´s crazy some times, poor little thing. Most of the stress is related about the way roads are built, I believe with some minor changes it would be ok. But also because education seems to be lost when you speak about travelling (I´m not only speaking about driving this time). Drivers at Madrid are far more agressive than outside it. They´ll pull you out of the road to be 5 seconds earlier. They´ll block the way if an ambulance is coming not to be late. They´ll pull their cars on the lane to block your way and make you brake hard just because they want to use your lane.

I love driving, and I´m not worried about driving here. I consider myself as a polite driver wich makes me feel sometimes weird when other beep me when I let somebody to get into my lane. But I don´t care.

I´ll tell you more about the matter, but I should go to bed know. God (or whatever you believe in (not god for myself) bless you all.

Farewell.

Manoel.

PS: Be careful on the road, please.