Ask anyone who has visited this
lovely country what they remember most and you’ll get the same answer: Georgian drivers. The point of driving in Georgia is not just
getting from point A to point B; it’s so much more. It is, in its simplest form, a series of
competitions – competition between drivers and the police, drivers and other
drivers, and drivers and pedestrians.
Let’s start from the beginning.
Getting
a driver’s license in this country is much more difficult than in the US. As in the US, there are two parts of the
licensing process – the theoretical and the practical. In the theoretical process, the would-be
driver has 30 minutes on a computer terminal at the local DMV to answer
correctly 27 of 30 questions randomly chosen from a bank of 1500. That’s right – 1500. The theoretical manual is about 4” thick, and
lists the 1500 questions and answers the examinee must know. Most Georgians (well, Georgian women anyway;
men tend to think they already know the answers to all driving questions and,
consequently, tend to fail miserably on their first attempt) spend hour upon
hour memorizing these questions just so they can pass the theoretical portion
of the exam. The test costs 50 Lari
($30), pass or fail, and the examinee must pay each time s/he takes the
test.
If the
examinee is successful, s/he moves on to the eye test. Interestingly, and quite frighteningly, the
eye test is only for color blindness.
There is no requirement, none at all, for the driver to have 20/20, 20/40,
or even 20/40,000 vision. I guess if you
can find your way to the DMV and then to the correct room for the exam, your
vision must be OK. There is also, as you might expect, no hearing
test, physical exam, or drug/alcohol screening.
This alone explains some of the moves you see on the highways here.
The
other part of the exam is the practical portion. Here the driver must negotiate an obstacle
course behind the DMV. There is no road
test here. Pass the obstacle course and
you’re in. But that’s not easy. First off, you can’t use your own car. Every examinee must take the test in a Skoda
sedan with manual transmission. Inside each
Skoda is four webcams and underneath are sensors which register when the car
crosses forbidden lines and curbs on the course. The first challenge is backing into a parking
space only slightly wider than the car.
I don’t know why they even test this since no one ever pays attention to
the lines after the get their license.
People park wherever there is space, regardless of whether that space
was designed for parking. That explains
why the sidewalks of Rustaveli and Chavchavadze Avenues double as parking
lots. And if the space is smaller than one’s
car, no problem; instead of parallel parking into the spot, I’ll simply pull in
nose first and put it in park. The fact
that my rear end hangs out well into the right hand lane doesn’t concern me at
all. It is, after all, your
responsibility to avoid me.
But I
digress. After backing into the parking
space, the examinee zigzags through a serpentine maze defined by traffic
cones. Not too terribly difficult, but
enough to cause some white knuckled wrestling with the steering wheel. Then a Y-turn into a square space large
enough to handle two mini-vans side by side, followed by a figure-eight through
more cones before coming to the climax of the examination: the hill climb.
The hill has a long incline, perhaps at 30-45 degrees, a long flat portion, and then a long decline, again at 30-45 degrees. The driver must come to a complete stop at the bottom of the
first ramp. S/he must drive up the ramp,
stopping halfway up. From
there, s/he must display mastery of the clutch and gear shift by getting the vehicle in upward motion again without either sliding back down the incline or flying over
the edge. S/he repeats the process on
the flat portion of the hill, and then again coming down the other side. This is the Waterloo moment when the driver
and the examiner who rode with him/her suddenly get out of the car and switch
places, with the examiner driving back to the DMV building. The test is over and the examinee has
failed.
You get
five chances, one week apart, to pass the obstacle course. If you do, you get your lifetime
license. Yup, lifetime. There are no renewal protocols here. Your license is yours forever. FOR. EVER.
You are now permitted to enter the world of driving in Georgia where
hesitancy is not tolerated and aggression is its own reward. Suddenly, the traffic laws you memorized to
pass the test become mere suggestions. Lane
markings are options for you to consider and zebra crossings are happy hunting
grounds for drivers eager to show their superiority over mere pedestrians.
The only
chance the pedestrian has for surviving the reign of terror created by Georgian
drivers is traffic congestion. When
traffic only moves at 4mph, there is at least a 50% chance you can cross the
street without serious bodily harm. And
what causes this congestion? According
to a nine-year study by the Georgian Ministry of Interior, the root cause of
traffic congestion is, “more cars on the road than ever before.” The other ally for the pedestrian: highway construction. I used to think the word “Tbilisi” meant “warm
place.” (It really does mean that, by
the way. “Tbil” means warm and “isi” is
the suffix meaning place.) Nope; “Tbilisi”
really is translated as “under construction.”
I would guess two-thirds of the streets and highways in Georgia have
been rendered completely impassible by highway construction. Eventually, all of this construction will
make Tbilisi, and Georgia, a better place for drivers and pedestrians. Of course, by the time all the construction
is complete, we will all be extinct and millions of cockroaches will enjoy
crawling along the wide open, cone-free highway system.
To
understand why highway construction takes so long, you have to look at how a
typical construction project works in this country. Phase
I is when the Traffic Cone Division places 60,000 traffic cones in, on, and
around the proposed construction site.
Often, this IS the project since placing traffic cones on a stretch of
street the length of Pennsylvania uses up all the money designated for the
entire project. Since the money’s now
gone, there’s no choice but to leave the cones in place and move on to the next
project.
Phase II is characterized by fat men
who come with jackhammers and sledge hammers to smash every piece of concrete
and asphalt into pieces no larger than a dime.
Except for the larger pieces which are left behind for trucks to pick up
and hurl at the windshield of the cars following the truck. This moves us to Phase III where nothing happens for six months.
Phase IV begins when huge, powerful
pieces of construction equipment are parked in and around the construction
site. Many of these pieces, I believe,
don’t even have engines. Eventually,
these pieces are worn away by weather and vandals and are chucked over the
shoulder into the nearest ravine.
Eventually, however, the project is completed and traffic moves
again. Or at least for six to seven
weeks when the Ministry of Poorly Constructed Streets and Highways declares
that particular part of the road impassible and returns the entire project to Phase I.
I’m
probably being too harsh. There is one
piece of highway construction equipment that does its job perfectly. As you pass the construction site at the same
rate of speed as the Statue of Liberty, past miles and miles of traffic cones
and construction equipment being swallowed by growing vines, you’re sure to
find a generator-powered electric sign telling you in English to “EXPECT
DELAYS.”
On the
streets that aren’t yet under construction, the recent fad is “drifting,”
usually in the prerequisite BMW or souped-up Honda Civic. To get an idea of what drifting is, and at
the same time to get a birds’ eye view of riding in a Tbilisi taxi, check out
these sites:
As
always, thanks for reading. Next time, I'll look at driving in Georgia from the pedestrian point of view. If I'm not run over and killed by then.
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