The Nightmare Of Driving In Barbados
Barbados sure is a crazy place as far as driving is concerned, it is an adventure every single time I drive anywhere on this island. Whether it is trying to avoid one of the many potholes, some of which if you were to drive into them, you would surely mess up your car real bad. The problem is especially bad at night because street lighting is virtually non-existent. Or the other major problem is trying to dodge people walking on the road, because pavements are also virtually non existent, and at night as you can imagine this is a massive problem for drivers and I suppose also for pedestrians.
Oh I almost forgot to mention, another favourite pastime in Barbados is when driving at night you have to have your full beam on all the time. You almost need to wear sun glasses to avoid getting blinded, the situation is that bad.
I oven wonder to myself if there is even a driving test in Barbados, because the standard of driving is unbelievable bad. Virtually every day I see the aftermath of an accident, I don’t mean major accidents, but stuff like someone going into the back of someone and giving their bumper a wee tap. Now what I cant understand, is that when this happens. The cars just stay where they are, and then they call the police. Which as you can imagine creates crazy traffic jams. Back home in the UK and most other countries the procedure, when there has been a minor bump, is to drive your car to the nearest place where you are not causing a disruption and then exchange details.
The only thing I can think of, as to why the police need to be called to deal with such minor incidents in Barbados, is the fact that they haven’t got anything better to do. In the UK if you called the police to deal with tapping another car with your bumper, you would be waiting for about a month for them to turn up.
Last week I had the misfortune to be involved in 2 minor bumps, which were both caused by people that can’t drive and have obvious concentration problems. It all started last Monday, when I was sitting waiting in slow moving traffic to pull out into the flow of the traffic, when a woman drove into the back of me. Fortunately it was nothing more than bumpers hitting, she apologised and said she wasn’t concentrating.
You wont believe this but fast forward 2 days to Wednesday and on the same road, but in a different place, a guy rammed into the back of me. He was pulling out of a side road and wham went straight into the back of me, causing the damage in the picture above. Again the driver gets out and apologises for hitting my car, you guessed it, and he wasn’t concentrating.
Maybe the $2000BDS he has got to pay for my car to be fixed will help him with his concentration problem. Maybe I should also charge him for the time and hassle it caused me having to mess around going to my insurance and wasted time, which could have been spent more productively, like going to the beach.
I’m not sure if drivers in Barbados are the worst in the world, because I haven’t been to every country in the world. But what I will say is that they are real bad and you need to have eyes in the back of your head to avoid them.
Just yesterday I witnessed a woman reversing around a corner while she was talking on her mobile phone, what a joke. Driving in Barbados is a dangerous game and I just with I could afford to buy a Hummer H2 that would make me feel a hell of a lot safer when driving on this island.
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[...] If Barbados wants to be taken seriously as a top quality tourist destination, they have to start doing something about things like the crap state of the roads and the lack of signs, because there are loads of countries out there that are doing everything they can to grab a slice of the tourist dollar. I have previously written about the joys of driving on the roads in Barbados, The Nightmare Of Driving In Barbados. [...]