Driving in Madrid

So to start off my blog, I think I will start with what has surprised me the most about Spain…the driving!  I admit that this was one area that I didn’t read much about before I left home to come here.   To be perfectly honest, I thought that the steering wheel would be on the left and that they would drive on the left side of the road as well.  However, as the plane closed into Madrid in the early morning hours of January 25, I saw that I was wrong looking down at the roadways.  This was confirmed when Dad and I went to get into our taxi.   This made me think all the more that driving here would be similar to that of the U.S. 

But I was wrong!  They have big green signs over all of their heavily trafficked roads (just like we do along Interstate), road signs basically liter the sides of the streets, and traffic lights are as plentiful as the taxis lined alongside the roads.  For a country that seems to be very organized, it is awfully chaotic.  Even though there are three lanes painted on the road, somehow there appears to be five lanes all cluttered together waiting to see who can take off the fastest to make it into the three lanes the fastest.  Oh, and then sometimes as soon as you turn on the street that you just waited at a light to turn on, you have to stop again.  The back half of your car doesn’t even make it onto the same street as your front half.  The taxis swerve in and out of traffic, reminding me very much of taxis that I have used in Mexico.

(Top) This is an example of “street signs” scattered throughout the city.  Those are not the actual street signs; they merely point to the direction you should go to get to that destination.  (Bottom) This is an actual street sign.  Similar to the old signs in New Orleans that were put on the streets themselves, the street signs are barely visible on the sides of buildings.  (It is very difficult to find the name of a street and the names of buildings here as they tend to not have a name plastered to the outside of many of their buildings.)

And I have been here for over a week now, and I have still not seen a single truck (besides two? work trucks).  I am talking not a single one…no little Ford Ranger’s or Toyota Tacoma’s, no Ford F250’s or Chevrolet Silverado’s (Although, I did see a commercial for a Silverado.), and certainly not any 18-wheelers.  I understand that it is a city with a lot of people in it and space is tight, but I can’t believe that not one person in this city owns a truck!  Parking, however, is a bit of a problem.  I though that trying to find a parking spot in New Orleans and then trying to actually parallel park the car was tough, well Madrid certainly proved that notion wrong.

Now, I will say that this is an extreme case scenario…I don’t know if you can tell from my picture, but that car is completely blocked in.  The cars on either side of it are touching it.  However, I have seen it a couple of times where one side of the car is touching another.  Most of the time, it is just really, really tight, but this example gets my point across the best I think!

On the other hand, many people own motorbikes/scooters/mopeds.  In fact, they may drive worse than the taxi drivers.  They not only swerve in and out of traffic, but they also drive right up onto the sidewalks.  Consequently, this is also where they park.