WARNING, ROAD RANT INCOMING! To save repetition and describing every road journey we make, we present here our view on Russian roads (at least as far as Moscow). The quality of roads vary greatly, from pristine 3 lane motorway to pitted, potholed and cracked pieces of tarmac with no lanes whatever marked. This variation is visible both inside and out of towns. Sometimes you can be driving a nice smooth road at 100km/hr, and suddenly find someone has cut out a large rectangle from the road for no apparent reason, and then seemingly got bored and gone home. In other places tram or railway lines cross the road with such little finesse of finish that you must reduce to crawling speed to avoid bursting tyres of you pass over the rails. Then there are the lanes. Chiefly an issue in the cities, lanes seem to be something of an afterthought on many of these roads. In some places they are marked, in others not. You may come up to a junction with some lights with 4 marked lanes all suitable for going straight on, but on the stretch of road opposite, there are just 2 lanes, necessitating a kind of card shuffling manoeuvre with the traffic as the lanes try to splice together. In other places lanes have not yet been installed, and you simply get a large pice of tarmac and, presumably, wishes of good luck. Minor accidents are very common, we must have seen around 15 or so thus far. There was also at least one far less minor incident, involving a lorry and a house. That caused quite a jam. Motorways also are not quite what we would recognise as motorways back home. For one thing, the hard shoulders here are actually soft shoulders (a strip of dirt and gravel at the side of the road) - at one point we were following a lorry who accidentally strayed onto this soft shoulder at around 80km/hr, and it simply ripped the tyre off one of his wheels and sent it bouncing off into the woods. Yesterday (~last Weds) we drove much of the m10, the main road from st Petersburg to Moscow. Given that these are the two primary cities of the country, we assume this is one of the best roads they have here. For most of the way, this is a three lane road. That is three lanes in total. One for each direction of traffic, and the middle one alternates to be an overtaking lane for each side in turn for about 600m at a time. There is no central barrier. Even on this road, the quality is such that at some points youre reduced to 40kph or less. We took a clip to illustrate at one point. Bear in mind this is basically THE main road to Moscow!
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 16:56:52 +0000
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