Page 59 - BNE_magazine_12_2019 dec19

bne December 2019 Eastern Europe I 59
Moscow has the second highest road rage score in the world
Ben Aris in Berlin
Mister Auto has released a survey of which cities in the world
are the best and worst to drive in that found Moscow has the second highest road rage index in the world, after only Ulaanbaatar.
The survey, released on November 12, ranked 100 top international cities using 15 criteria divided by three subcategories covering infrastructure, safety and costs on a scale of 1-100. Canada’s Calgary came out as the best place in the world to drive on the composite with a score of 100 and is the benchmark for all other cities. Dubai, Ottawa, Bern in Switzerland and El Paso in the US, in that order, take up the rest of the top five.
The survey included four Eastern European cities, Prague, Warsaw, Moscow and St Petersburg, that in a surprise to no one all ranked near the bottom of the list. Prague did by far the best and the driving experience
is already on a par with its western European peers, ranking 58 over all out of 100 cities. But Warsaw, Moscow and St Petersburg are all near the bottom
of the list ranked at 80, 89 and 91 respectively.
Drilling into the details, there is much that fits the stereotype of driving in Eastern Europe, with a few surprises. Anyone who has driven in Moscow knows how simultaneously terrifying and boring it can be as you deal either with being overtaken on the inside by a car travelling at over 150km/h on one of the so-called eight-lane spoke roads that feed the centre of the city, or get immobilised in
a traffic jam for hours on end.
The biggest danger is the reckless driving by some better-off Russians
in fast cars, who can afford pay off traffic cops if they are stopped. That is set against the tendency for Moscow’s drivers to drive into a junction when the traffic is heavy, ignoring the red
lights, and getting stuck, causing gridlocks at crossings that bring traffic to a standstill.
Moscow scored 98.46 for road rage on a scale of 1-100, second only to the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar, which got a score of 99.12, from the entire 100 cities surveyed. That result will surprise anyone that has driven in the Mongolian capital where the traffic is not very heavy, as the city is located in a grassy valley, not large at all, and simply peters out into fields after a few kilometres. But driving
is made chaotic by the venal traffic cops, the terrible state of the roads, and the number of horses on the road, as most of the bucolic population get around on horseback as the country has so few cities. The country with the least road rage in the world is Osaka, Japan’s second largest city, where public transport predominates as the preferred form of getting around.
Moscow scored 98.46 for road rage on a scale of 1-100, second only to the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar in a survey by Mister Auto.
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