LOL...that was my first thought as I read this account!
Now, there is corruption everywhere. And there is corruption, and there is Corruption.
There are certain things I pay attention to, and certain things I don’t. Up until a few months ago, I was completely unaware of the ubiquity of dash cams in Russian cars. When all that video of the meteor came out, I was kind of surprised that there were so many variations of the video.
I wondered “What the heck...it seems like everyone drives around with them over there!”
And then I became aware of the Crazy Russian Driver videos all over the Internet. (FR probably pointed me to them)
Turns out, things are so corrupt that if you don’t have video evidence of an accident, the other party will have already paid off the authorities and you have to just suck it up. So a lot of people have them because of corruption to protect themselves and their property.
But I will say, we found the videos wildly entertaining...we concluded, after watching hours of this video, three things:
1.) Russians are incredibly crazy and incompetent drivers who have no idea of defensive driving
2.) There are a huge number of completely sh**faced drivers on Russian roads
3.) If there are traffic laws, they are neither observed nor enforced (unless **someone** needs some money)
I was so curious about this whole Crazy Russian Driver thing, that I had to ask a female Russian physican I know if it was true, that it is as crazy as it appears.
Without a second of hesitation, she stated flatly that it was every bit as insane on the Russian roads as it appeared in these videos. And she wasn’t smiling or laughing, even though she clearly could see I found it humorous.
I thought if there were as many dashcams here as over there, we might see equally crazy stuff. But I put about 25-30K miles on my car and have had the good fortune to drive through many states, I have never, NEVER seen anything approaching what appeared commonplace on these videos.
I watched one video of a street in a small town where you could see three women standing outside a shop facing each other in an intimate circle of conversation, as traffic went by.
A car flew through the intersection and plowed into another one, T-Boned it, a pretty violent and noisy crash.
30 yards away the women in the background barely paused and glanced before resuming their conversation! It is either some deep seated mental remnant of the Soviet state that you don’t pay attention to things that don’t involve you, or this kind of thing happens ALL the time!