The other thing I have seen happen here in the UK is cars travelling in opposite directions down narrow lanes get stuck together - in some places, the country lanes are single track width - just wide enough for one vehicle - and have ‘passing places’ where the road is just wide enough for vehicles to squeeze past each other, except that sometimes those passing places are just mud banks that slope up from the road surface - so in wet weather, cars trying to pass each other pull up onto the wet muddy bank, then while they are passing, they slide sideways and get jammed together. Here’s a rather extreme example (that is, this does not appear to be a proper passing place): This road's not big enough for both of us - how two cars didn't go into one North Devon country lane | West Country - ITV News
we have low bridges where trucks get stuck and they are pulled out
I have not seen any wedge-shaped streets anywhere, so you can’t get wedged in. A narrow street could mean that you lose some paint trying to get through, but in just about every case you could reverse out again, albeit with expensive noises.
However, there is a related problem in many parts of Europe for trucks. Where the route marking is less than stellar, it is possible to end up going down streets that look as if they are an alternative route through the town, and then change at an intersection to something narrower, as they only lead to a bunch of houses. Trucks go in and can’t get through, reversing can be really difficult. That said, I am amazed at what some truck drivers can negotiate if they need to deliver in a narrow street.
There was a famous MIT prank in the Seventies in which a VW Beetle was disassembled in a parking lot, and then reassembled inside someone’s dorm room.
I also find it difficult to see how this could happen, except on purpose or when you’re drunk or being chased or so. When you drive on narrow Italian streets you’d automatically watch out in fear of hitting the walls. If this isn’t second nature to you, you’d have accidents also during normal driving. And if you drive into a progressively narrower street, you wouldn’t do it at race speed. You’d start scratching the walls at one side of the car and losing the mirrors before you’d be stuck at both sides. To continue after hearing scratch noises means you deliberately try to press on.
It does happen in Croatia occasionally. I have no idea what happens next.
However, this and especially this is much more common sight.
That’ll buff right out.
One thing I’ve always wondered is why “2 way” country roads in Europe are often just 1 or 1.5 lanes wide. I can understand that they started that way long ago when it was just slow horse travel, but why haven’t they been expanded to actually fit 2 modern vehicles side-by-side? Cities have buildings which limit the width of the road, but country roads are frequently along fields which would not prevent the road from being widened.
a) It’s expensive. There are a lot of those roads, and the ones with the most through traffic have already been expanded or replaced.
b) There are a lot of those roads and for every one you’d need more of a justification for using eminent domain to take land from the adjacent property owners than “It would make a very slight improvement for local traffic.”
c) The villages these roads connect often have buildings that prevent those stretches of roads to be expanded anyway, so in some cases you’d just enable people to hurry along one stretch and be left to wait their turn to get through the village.
I would think the increase in safety would be enough of a justification. When I drove in the Provence area of France, it was sort of terrifying to drive along some of the skinny roads with oncoming traffic. I would have to hug the right side of the road and expected to hear “smack!” of mirrors as the oncoming car wizzed by at high speed. Nothing ever happened, but it wouldn’t have taken much for a head-on collision with our cars just inches apart.
Yep, not just expensive to do, but expensive to maintain; road maintenance scales with surface area of tarmac, not just linear length; furthermore, widening the road is a defacto upgrade for heavier traffic, so it might need the whole road bed redone, and upgraded roads have a knock on effect on traffic flow through previously quiet areas.
In short, it’s been like that for centuries, and the majority of people who might really want it changed are not locals, so tough shit.
Those potential head-on collisions are obviously rare enough that the people who use those roads on a daily basis are not concerned. Which doesn’t mean they don’t occur of course, or that the locals don’t suffer from biases of their own, but your impression as a visitor unfamiliar with the type of road and traffic isn’t worth all that much.
Plus, how do you know that doesn’t already happen, as and when (and where) accident rates are held to justify it?
When we visited Ireland many years ago, Pepper Mill and I got stuck on a road going into some town in southeast Ireland. We turned around and simply avoided the town. It turned out that a bus had blocked traffic (I don’t think it got stuck, as in the OP. It’s just that traffic coming after it blocked its way when the going got too narrow, and nobody could back up because everyone would have to back up.)
So evidently what happens is that traffic slows to zero and everyone’s stuck until cars peel out one by one. If there are few or no alternate roads, this can take forever.
There is no increase in safety.
Making a road “look” safer doesn’t. People will correct for the perceived increase in safety with more speed. Given that people are not very good at assessing risk associated with speed this will not make anything safer.
Another problem with trying to widen narrow country roads is that it quite often involve removing massive numbers of trees, hedgerows, berms and such along nearly the whole length of the road, thus often tripling the cost.
I saw something similar a couple of months back in my town. We have a place where two streets both come to dead ends. But there’s a sidewalk that connects them so pedestrians can cross between them.
I saw a car come to the end of one of the streets and apparently decide he didn’t want to turn around. So he drove up on the sidewalk to cross over to the other street.
Some drivers do dumb things. I have no problem imaging a driver going down a narrowing street and getting himself stuck.
This reminds me of one of my favorite saved photos:
It does not surprise me that both drivers in this photo have NY state license plates; and from the looks of it, from personal experience, I think I even recognize this exact toll plaza (now bygone, with “cashless tolling systems” now being installed everywhere).
All of your bolded points and questions are very pertinent. The driver of the car on the left side of the photo actually looks bored or resigned as he considers his current position; the driver of other car has somehow gotten out, but HOW?
And just how dumb/macho did both of these guys have to be to have this end result?
In terms of getting a driver getting their car stuck in a “narrow street” that surely has signs indicating pedestrians only or something, I would have to assume that’s something GPS related. If it ever happened at all.
On the whole I have faith in European driving requirements resulting in “could not possibly be this oblivously stupid” drivers being weeded out at a much, much higher rate than is evident in a country like the USA, where driving oneself around is practically a civil right. The bar is set quite low…
Wasn’t there a Top Gear episode where they tried to get Lamborghinis (or something similar) through some of those streets. It’s long enough ago that I can’t remember if one of them got stuck or only slowed down horribly. I do remember shots of inches to spare.