I've been pondering this for years. They are entirely different.
In the UK the law is everything. Drivers believe that if what they are doing is legal, then little additional care is needed and they have an absolute right to do it. Drivers have no tolerance for actions of other drivers which they perceive as illegal.
There is a considerable amount of courtesy on the roads.
Drivers see no need to try to anticipate other peoples' illegal actions, there is no tolerance or allowance for mistakes. Road rage is common to one degree or another. All road users of one type hate all users of another - car - vs. cycle, car vs. truck, etc. etc.
In Chile, though pretty true of Argentina, Brazil and Peru also, there is little regard for the law and no expectation that anybody will be following the law if it is inconvenient. No drivers are bothered by another driver doing something illegal. At all. The citizen police and youtube warriors don't exist.
There is no courtesy. Nobody lets anybody out ever for any reason. Consequently it's always a matter of who blinks first, someone does and retaliates by blowing his horn at the person who didn't. It ends there.
Drivers have a greater awareness of everything going on around them. Because there is no expectation of law adherence and thus predictability, people look around far more.
However, the most unacceptable behaviour is to inconvenience someone else, even if what you are doing is entirely legal. Horn blowing is like the national anthem, though actual road rage is comparatively rare.
There is no more rivalry between users of a different type than there is users of a single type.
Between Chile and the UK the two styles of driving are quite incompatible. It's far easier to die on the roads in South America, but that's usually because of the high speed, poorly thought out, roads in the large gaps between cities. The other day driving back to Santiago in the middle of the afternoon, about 400km, I passed 4 large accidents where lanes were blocked and people had been injured.
p.s. generalisations rule ok.
|
