As most of you know, I’ve lived my entire life in a really small town.  And by small town I don’t mean what newscasters usually mean when they say that same phrase.  This is not a town of ‘only’ 5,000 people.  I live in a village of about 300.  So yeah, I know all about rural driving.

It still terrifies me.

More so than driving in the city, driving in my own town terrifies me sometimes.  Why?  Because the drivers are insane.  People who live in rural areas tend to take the exact same route to work every day and usually you’re lucky if you see one car on that route.  So over the years people get lazy and stop doing things like checking for other cars at intersections and drive down the middle of the road on blind corners or hills because they think “Oh well, there’s never anyone here anyway.”  Except when there is.

Last Saturday I yet again avoided a collision in the middle of town.  We only have one paved road in town (the main street) and I was going down the road on my way to the gas station.  I drive a fairly little car you see, so I’m always on the look out for people in bigger vehicles who don’t watch where they’re going.  Thank goodness I did because in an intersection that dumps onto the main road some idiot was coming down in a great big truck and was not going to stop at the stop sign.  (This is a fairly common problem as there’s only ever one cop in the area and he usually works on the main highway.)  So I jammed on my brakes and honked my horn to get their attention.  They stopped and then had the nerve to wave at me to go on as if I was the idiot in the scenario.  Ugh.

So yes, rural drivers are terrifying.  They don’t look at all where they’re going, they often drive way too fast (150km/h in a 100km/h zone on a regular basis) and most people drive big trucks so collisions are really nasty when they do happen.  In a lot of ways, driving in my village is way more terrifying than driving in the city.  At least in the city I know most people are watching where they’re driving; in my village I know most people aren’t watching where they’re driving.

In your experience, where are the drivers the worst?  If you live in a rural area, do you notice the same problems or is my village just special?