Safety from the passenger seat?

My parents question my decision not to drive in Belgium.

"Not even in your own little town?"

I laugh, but how do I explain the driving situation here to folks who are used to the Atlantic Canadian concept of traffic… I remember a time when a 20-minute wait for traffic lights was a long, annoying commute.

A 20-minute wait on the Antwerp ring might get you 30cm!

But it's not the volume of traffic that has me confined to the passenger seat because I drove without (much) fear in Los Angeles. I can handle the eight-lane highways. The trouble with driving here is a bit more intangible.

This leads me to the 'unique' Belgian driving rules; the most confusing for newcomers being Priorité à droite. As it does in English droite (right) has two meanings: the opposite of left and a legal or presumed entitlement.

Priorité à droite definitely embodies both of these definitions. The rule is: if you are driving along and someone is entering your road from the right, you must yield to them.

This almost makes sense in a four-way stop where all roads are of equal size. But imagine barreling along a major road and suddenly a car pulls out of an unmarked lane you didn't notice until the last second …

Of course there are exceptions to the priorité, but only Belgians are allowed to know them.

Secondly, Belgians feel entitled to enter from the right, without looking, hesitating or even glancing in your direction … even when it makes no earthly sense for them to do it.

They would rather have the traffic clog up to a standstill than surrender their priority!

If everyone in Belgium was Belgian, maybe this would work out. However, there are a lot of non-Belgians here, especially in Brussels, so you can never be 100 percent sure what the car in front of you is going to do.

Belgians, like most Europeans, also drive much faster than North Americans. For example, Everberg looks like a quaint, quiet little town. It is rural and charming and very, very quiet … until quitting time rolls around.

During rush hour, I feel like our house is 1m away from the finish line at the Monaco Grand Prix.

The Belgians who don't live in their cars, protest the speeds at which people race through their towns.

They have thus designed giant speed bumps that require a 4X4 to get over and cement barriers that only allow one car to pass at a time. They planted trees in the street (yes … in the street) and painted parking spaces in one lane.

The latter results in another quirky rule: If there is a car parked in the street on your side of the road, you pull up behind it as close as you can and yield to oncoming traffic. Once the traffic has passed, you turn on your signal light and whip out into the street.

The other problem for expats and tourists is the lack of signage. Somewhere along the line, Belgians decided they knew where everything was, so why bother to waste good money on something as frivolous as signs (especially when they could spend it on trees to plant in the street)?

So don't bother looking for route numbers or signs 5km ahead of your exit to warn you where to go… they just aren’t there.

In the unlikely event that there is a sign, you have to already be in the exit lane in order to see it.

Sometimes, if the sign budget is really tight, there will be a sign only on one side of the highway, so if you’re traveling in the opposite direction you don't see it until you've done a u-turn because 'Brussels can't possibly be this close to Paris …'

Add to that the place-name problem. Belgium, being a bilingual country has place names in Flemish and French. Unlike in Canada where we call our cities the same thing in French and English (and if there is any confusion, print our signs in both languages) the Belgians don't.

If you are in a Flemish province, all of the place names are in Flemish. If you are in a French province, they are in French. This doesn't cause a huge problem if your destination is Brussels: Brussel in Flemish; Bruxelles in French).

However, it can be a problem if you are looking for Antwerp (Antwerpen in Flemish) and you unwittingly enter a French province and only see signs for Anvers. Then there are the totally unfathomable ones like Mons/Bergen and Tourai/Doornik. Your English maps aren't going to help you here.

Lastly, there is my number one reason for not driving in Belgium: trucks or lorries as the Brits call them, or evil-machines-of-death as I call them.

I hate transport trucks (this may have something to do with being run off the road by one and doing a complete 360 in the air and landing in a snowy median a few winters ago, totaling my car and my driving nerve).

I have never seen so many trucks as on the highways here. They come from all over Europe: Germany, Poland, Spain  ... and they carry anything and everything.

There is nothing more unnerving than being sandwiched in traffic, in road construction narrowed lanes, between four huge trucks.

So mom, dad, I won’t be driving here anytime soon. Maybe if I harden my heart and develop nerves of steel and an overblown sense of entitlement while behind the wheel will I be ready to hop in the driver's seat.

Until then, I am sticking to the passenger side.

CheeseWeb

22 September 2005