A Polish Road
Poland: The Bad Thing About Polish Roads Is The Drivers
Warsaw, Poland 9 March, 2007 It is the drivers on the roads in Poland that make them dangerous and all the dangerous drivers are not Polish. Poland is the main transit point between Western Europe and Russia and suffers as a result of it. The roads don't kill people. The drivers kill people. And the drivers are from all over Europe.
People who blame deaths on the roads do the country a disservice. They likely have a financial interest in road improvement or they are covering for their own irresponsibility.
Driving in Eastern Europe is simply dangerous, no matter what the condition of the roads. Building high speed transit ways only increases the speeds at which people are killed.
Thousands of trucks come from Russia and Western Europe cross Poland every day. They fuel up before they come into Poland and get across the country as fast as they can. They kill people.
The current dispute in the Rospuda Valley, for example, generally revolves around trucks hauling to and from Russia going through a town and killing people.
And little has been done to stop them from continued killing. Effective traffic control procedures and timed traffic lights are non-existent. The trucks have just been allowed to go on running over the children.
Transiting foreign truck drivers are not, however, to be blamed for everything.
An unfortunately large number of Polish drivers are definitely not a responsible lot.
A large majority of the drivers in Poland just ignore any safety rules. Traffic regulations are suggestions that you should expect to be ignored.
Just across the border in Czech there is an open road on which there is an inordinately high number of deaths of Polish people. Drivers leave Poland, get on a clear road, take their cars to high speeds and kill themselves and their families.
People are killed in crosswalks. Improving roads is not going to stop the killing in the crosswalks in the cities. Oddly no one is complaining about the bad crosswalks in the cities that kill people.
The driving culture in Poland is essentially one of take a chance, ignore the rules, drive like you are in a race and expect people to get out of your way.
Consider the case of the Polish swimmer who ran off the left side of the road in an accident that killed her brother. When the news was first published there was a lot of talk about how bad the Polish roads are.
According to later reports, however, she was driving at high speed and attempting to pass a line of cars ahead of her and had to veer off the road to the left to avoid hitting another car head on. One must seriously question if it was the road that made her do it or her failure to drive the speed limit and pass traffic sensibly. The court will decide.
Drivers often blame their bosses for giving them schedules that cause them to have accidents. But you are warned, whenever you see a company car, even nights and weekends when the driver is using it for personal purposes and has his family with him, the driver may not care because the car is not his. If he has an accident, he will get a new one.
Road killing happens in towns and cities. The drivers weave in an out. They drive at high speeds. They ignore traffic signals, lines in the roads and take risks.
Improving the roads in towns and cities is not going to change this killing.
Educating the public and enforcing the rules will.
Until the people of Poland decide they want safe roads, the killing will continue. Build all the motorways that you want. The people will kill pedestrians in the cities, drive into bus stops, drive over barrier fences and down into the subway entrances, and drive drunk.
The roads in Poland are not dilapidated. It is just than an unfortunate large number of drivers, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and every other nationality are immature, unregulated and irresponsible. They blame their problems on the roads.
But road improvement is necessary because it stimulates the economy. And with improved roads it will be easier for the ambulance and fire vehicles to get to the accidents.
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