The absurdity of urban driving

A fault accident due to poor signage, or how to learn to drive with your insurance… Imagine the situation… you’re driving to the doctor… You’re in a city where parking on the road is a tradition, a custom… what am I saying? A commandment of good practice for fitting in with this type of city! Parking is prohibited and now monitored by officers via

onboard cameras that you can’t see (neither the officer nor the camera) and thanks to which you receive a ticket by mail!!! Okay, the situation is a mess… I’m driving on a four-lane street: two lanes in and two in… one of which is blocked by these infamous illegal parking spaces! At the traffic light, I want to turn right… I should be in the far right lane… shouldn’t I? But I can’t!!! So, to the left…

There are no horizontal (road markings) or vertical (signs) markings indicating that you have to be on the right to turn right: so there are two possibilities… both lanes go straight or both lanes go to the right (because it wasn’t possible to turn left). At the traffic light, there’s a car in the right lane, driven by a young guy who’s “tuned” his car… music blasting, phone on, like, “vroom, vroom, I’m showing off”… you’ll see, “I’m gonna wreck your car” (just kidding… sort of!). So, since I want to turn right, I put on my turn signal to avoid any collision and am extra vigilant, just in case the car on my right hasn’t seen me turn… The light turns green… I start moving and make a very wide turn to avoid another collision… I barely think about it before I do it! Side impact: rear right door dented and the front left corner scraped at the bottom of the body and fender!

Because my dear neighbor was going straight ahead!

I was trying to park so as not to block the other drivers…and then, barely out of my car, still shaken from the impact, I heard the young man yelling…saying I’d cut him off…and a few choice words were exchanged until two law enforcement officers arrived.

These two sheriffs, all “Good morning, Madam, good morning, Sir, we are the police”…I thought to myself, “Okay, you guys are something else!”

They explained that there was no point in getting angry and that we needed to

fill out an accident report

…as if we didn’t know that and were going to run away from them!

Well, apart from an accident…nothing too interesting!

Except that after a few days, I learned from my insurance company that the one who goes straight is always right…Conclusion: always go straight!!!! And go for it!