Driving in Sicily

I tend to grouse a fair bit when something rubs me the wrong way, and a lot rubs me the wrong way about what I perceive as bad or just plain rude driving in California. One of my biggest gripes is that it used to be illegal to pass on the right, but on the freeway everyone does it now, even CHP cars. Why does ‘everyone’ pass on the right? Because there is almost always some jackass in the fast lane going slower than the flow of traffic.

I’m not a fast driver. I’m a ‘take it to the track’ guy who gets mad enough to call the CHP when I see someone going over 100, and I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket in my life. But I like to go as fast as I feel is safe, which is generally as fast as the general flow of traffic allows. So when some buttclamp is parked in the fast lane talking on his cell phone while even those in the slow lane are passing him, I get angry.

When we arrived in France in 1999 and I started driving every day in Lyon, I was a bit overwhelmed by the take-no-prisoners approach to getting around in a car. A British friend who lives in France and is married to a French woman explained to me that all Frenchmen think they’re Alain Prost or at least pretend they are. But that idea fell apart when I noticed that as often as not it was women and even elderly women in Twingos and Peugeot 106s who were blazing past me on narrow roads.

I adapted, though, and soon got to enjoy driving in France. I especially liked how religiously the French follow the freeway etiquette of NEVER passing on the right and how the slower cars automatically move as far right as there is space until it comes time to pass someone. Even fast drivers stay right until they want to pass another car. Perhaps we just have too many cars on the road to make this feasible, but I think there’s another explanation. Too many California drivers fear having to merge with other cars. Half the time when you see someone come up the onramp and go directly to the fast lane and hunker down for the duration of his day’s trip, it’s someone who looks nervous, lacking confidence, both hands gripping the wheel tightly. The other half of the time it’s clearly just some inconsiderate tool who thinks he or she owns the road and doesn’t care about endangering the lives of others.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I had also driven in Northern Italy on several occasions during trips from Lyon. At the time, Italian freeways seemed chaotic compared to the order and politeness of France. The Italians seemed to go as fast as they wanted and use whatever lane they wanted and it was amazing we didn’t see an accident about every two miles.

But even that experience did not prepare me for driving in Sicily, which is a land of narrow, two-lane roads. The autostrada is not so bad, since it has two lanes in each direction and is a high-speed path that, with fuel being so expensive, is much less populated than the smaller roads. The real craziness happens when you have a narrow road with only one lane in each direction. You can get on one of the ‘highways’ in Sicily with anything from a powerful Mercedes-Benz to a two-stroke scooter to a donkey with the flu. So you find yourself sharing the single lane with vehicles going 100 mph to look important or 20 mph to save gas (or because that’s simply as fast as that beloved hunk of junk can go).

This presents a challenge for the middle of the road vehicle, one who doesn’t want to noodle all the way from the top of the island to the bottom, but who also doesn’t want (or who lacks the horsepower) to make others eat his dust. There are so many slow (and I mean S-L-O-W) cars (or micro cars, or tiny three-wheeled junior pickup trucks powered by lawnmower engines) on these roads that someone is always passing someone else, and –here’s the troublesome part—this is happening in both directions at the same time. These two lane roads are effectively four very narrow lanes.

I can’t count how many times we observed a slow car in each opposing lane being passed at the same time, the faster passing cars coming very close to each other in the middle of the road. This is possible because the slowest cars pull to the right, sometimes right onto the shoulder, when they see that one of the kamikaze double-opposing-passes is about to happen.

As a spectator event this can get pretty exciting when one or more big trucks and a blind curve are involved. We didn’t actually see any accidents (though we came across a few that had just happened), but there must occasionally be horrific head on collisions in Sicily because the drivers do some insane things trying to get around slower traffic.

And trucks, no matter how slowly they’re going or how many scores of cars are stuck behind them on winding narrow roads, will NEVER pull over. On one stretch of road we got stuck in our puny diesel Fiat Idea climbing a hill and fifteen or so cars behind a very slow truck that was vomiting thick black smoke as it trudged upward at 25 miles per hour. BMWs zipped around us, passing three or four cars at a time before ducking back into our lane to give some room to opposing drivers who were passing on their downhill route. But we of little power just didn’t have the pep to pass anyone on those hills. The road had turnouts, too—sections where a slow truck could pull to the side for a bit and let us by. But this goes against some gene, apparently.

Following that truck was an extreme in our experience, but there always seemed some much slower car to get around, which made driving almost anywhere very stressful. I think it would’ve been fun in a fast car and without concern for the cost of gas. A rich guy in a Ferrari could really get some use out of a car like that. But if there were truth in advertising, the Fiat Idea would be renamed the Fiat Bad Idea, at least in such a mountainous region as Sicily.

As insane as the Sicilian norm seems to my sensibilities, I can only imagine what a Sicilian would think while driving down 880 or pretty much any other freeway around here. Madon! They have four wide lanes in each direction but you never know where the slow cars will be, left, right, in the middle, and the fast cars pass on all sides whenever they want—it’s madness!

What works for us because we as a culture have gotten slowly accustomed to it and know what to expect would likely seem just as strange to Sicilians as their system seemed to me, but likewise theirs is what has developed over time for them and it works there because they know what to expect. Driving in Sicily redefines for us what is ‘safe’ driving, and makes some of the rules we choose still to obey seem overly cautious. I suppose the natural progression of driving is that it will get crazier and crazier until the very edge is found by the number of fatalities becoming too great. We tolerate the number of deaths we have now (forty thousand a year, apparently) as acceptable.

I don’t know how many they have each year in Sicily, but I feel lucky to have survived those roads. I’ll try to keep that experience in mind the next time I pass someone on the right.