Big cities, like New York, Houston, and LA, have their "healthy" share of bad drivers. Sadly, Moscow is in the same league. The trouble with Moscow is that its roads, because of their design and poor signage, inadvertently encourage bad driving.
I normally stay off of roads and strongly prefer riding Moscow excellent metro system, but my hand was forced this week due to special circumstances that necessitated my shuttling my daughter between two schools. On Thursday, a massive snowstorm brought things to a head. Traffic came to a crawl and erstwhile bad drivers became crazily bad drivers.
The mass behavior was absurd. Individual drivers, in attempt to get to their destination slightly faster, inadvertently colluded in a clownish fashion and slow everyone down. Some of the clownish acts included blocking the intersections, dangerously cutting off fellow drivers, and swerving recklessly through the traffic on the very slippery roads. And, as it happens, the more expensive the car, the more offensive the driver tended to be.
Car Sucks; Driver is Good
The poor guy in his Lada drives better than the jerk in his expensive Mercedes. My guess is that the poor guy in his Lada is literally poor; he cannot afford a car wreck. The boor in the Mercedes is not poor and a dent on his or anyone else's car means little to him. To put it simply, there is a higher probability that the Benz driver is - ahem - an asshole.
New Car Smell? No, It's the A**hole Inside.
Therein lays the biological challenge. Simple human anatomy would dictate that there is a one-to-one relationship between number of people and sphincters for any given road mile, no matter how congested that mile may be. In other words, the s-to-h ratio should always be 1. As it turns out, the more congested the road gets, the bigger the s-to-h ratio gets. Get stuck in Moscow's downtown traffic during a snowstorm and it becomes abundantly clear that there are a plump many more assholes than people running around on that mile.
