All right, these things are pretty addictive…my daughter and I just watched about 45 minutes of them (all in the spirit of driver’s ed, I assure you ;)). Anyway, things I’ve learned so far:
If someone cuts you off in traffic and gets a baseball bat out of his trunk, you’d best be holding a hatchet.
The best response to impending danger ahead is to speed up. You might get past it!
Honking your horn wildly does not stop an uncontrolled vehicle from slamming into you.
Russian women make a distinct and slightly fetching sound when alarmed. Russian men always follow an accident by saying something that sounds rich in sarcasm.
That’s all so far, but there’s still lots more to watch!
All I’ve learned from watching those videos is just to run over the assholes. I mean, seriously, I’m not a violent guy, but something about watching videos like this one makes me wish the driver just slammed on the accelerator and ran over the jackass.
The thing that strikes me about many of those videos is the apparent failure of the Russian government to provide the infrastructure to keep their citizens safe!
So many of them show sizable intersections but with no traffic control at all – not even simple stop signs. Here in Minneapolis, we have about 10,000 intersections in the city, and I don’t think there is a single one without at least a stop sign or signal light for one of the streets. (Obviously, some drivers still run red lights or roll thru stop signs.) But we, thru our government, have invested in traffic controls to reduce the risk.
That doesn’t seem to have been done there, from what is shown in these videos.
I remember one (I think in St. Petersburg, Russia) showing a compilation of crash after crash at the intersection. But this was a major intersection (2-3 lanes on all 4 sides, with heavy traffic moving at pretty good speeds), and no visible traffic controls at all. Crashes seem inevitable at such a location.
These videos do show many bad drivers. But I think they also show a bad government!
I kind of like the guy at 5:30, who gets into an accident, then just casually grabs his book bag and walks away from the car, like absolutely nothing happened and he’s just continuing on his day.
That’s the one–I wasn’t sure if the other guy (driver’s side) was a pedestrian or someone from the vehicle. (Presumably, the driver.) The whole scene has a kind of Blues Brothers nonchalance to it.
heavens to betsy! i couldn’t watch the whole thing, but dang! hollywood could hire some of these drivers as stuntdrivers. i’m amazed at how many were able to just walk away.
like the guy who jumped on and off the car at 5:30.
It’s only been 22 years since the fall of the USSR. How many people in Russia, outside of the military, had cars, or even knew how to drive, under communism? The stuff in these videos has all the hallmarks of a place with no established driving culture. So the results are what we might see in the USA if we just turned a bunch of 14-year-olds in cars loose with no training.
There’s a whole other genre that is basically mad Russian folk climbing up and hanging off radio masts, bridges etc. Here’s an example (sorry about the music):
