Chile Forum

Ah, the memories. There was this one bus driver on the 606 in Vina that literally scared me. That is not easy to do. But this clown was driving like he was in a race. Those buses don't corner or handle well enought to drive them that way. As I got off I told him he missed his calling and should have been a Formula One driver. Surprised look on his part.... totally clueless.

tombrad2 wrote:Chile is a new rich´s country, always been so, money is earned and lost very fast here, the only nobility in Chile is from "Rey del Mote con Huesillos" and his court.
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hey, I know that guy. He is everywhere. I seen him in the central park of Temuco.

I do believe there is something to the first generation driver problem. Especially in the States, we grow up sitting on our dad's lap as he drives or at least next to them. We get our drivers licenses at 16, and most people have at least done some practice driving with a relatives car much younger than that. Driver's education is often mandatory if you want to drivers license before 18, and a lot of families have 2 cars. It is a serious driving culture. Just ask anyone in Santiago if they know how to change their own oil. Hell, ask them if they know how to pump their own gas. Most do not even interact with their cars at a gas station.

I highly recommend anyone looking to buy a used 4x4 of any sort to look for ones in Las Condes. They have never seen a dirt road, besides the occasional drive over the medium at an intersection to get around traffic. I am serious. We bought a couple for some clients in the Patagonia a few years ago, and they where basically brand new.

You want real fun, try following those drunken tired drivers up and down the mountain to the ski resorts outside Santiago on the weekend as they get their 30 mins a year of practice driving on icy mountain switchbacks.

Down south people deal with a lot more weather, and a bit more off-road driving conditions. I would not call them the best drivers, but adequate for where they live. At least there are not as many people.

Like my dad Always Says "Los Gringos Nacen en un Auto"

Y probablemente muchos se hacen en un auto también

tombrad2 wrote:Y probablemente muchos se hacen en un auto también

Allowing adolescents to drive was very unpopular when state laws (as with most aspects of daily life, driving is a matter of state regulation in the United States, not federal) began, just a few generations ago, to permit teenagers to drive. One editorialist said that such a law (in New York state, if I remember correctly) would allow "bedrooms on wheels".

I havent driven in Santiastico but almost everywhere else south of Concepción and I have not found it so bad as Jaime has expressed.. although I do come from Perth Australia where road rage is something else.. so the road rage I have experienced here is nothing compared to the one you would experience in Perth on a good day.. Perth is a city of perhaps 1.5million people.. small in comparison to say Sydney or Melbourne yet the road rage experienced there is inexplicable.. most drivers will never let you in.. will cut you off.. and speed up so that you dont over take them.. and thats just on a good day.. I have seen worse, where a car has literally smashed another out of its way.. so driving in Chile has been great in my book.. disorganised and sometimes frantic but I've never had someone cut me off on purpose or gotten mad cause I cut them off.. but you definitely gotta be alert and anticipate whats going to happen.. always.. and compared to driving in Perú, Indonesia and Thailand, Chile is safe!

i'll agree with that, driving in Chile is safe and not bad at all. After a couple of years in Italy with the last year and half in Naples, everything here is a breeze. Roads are typically in good shape, nice and wide and never have to worry about a two lane road becoming a four lane road.......when I first got to the Naples area, I was staying in a hotel along the water with a road between the hotel and the beach. On Thursday night the horn honking was louder than normal so I went to take a look.....4 lanes of cars, none moving and all honking their horns. The road was designed for one lane in both directions (a typical street) but the the traffic heading east had started backing up and so the Italians decided to not only make it so the lane normal for one car, would be used by not just but two, but three cars side by side. So now the road is 3 lanes heading east and one heading west....but of course three lanes wasn't enough for a couple of people and they decided to try and use the west bound part of the street to go east. So I sat and watched how a normal road had turned into a parking lot.......

Naples was also one of the very few places that on any given day, i would see about 10 or more cars with their side view mirrors either hanging on the side of the door or duct taped in position....

The roads in and around Santiago are absolutely terrible - ask any native. It's high on their ever-lengthening complaint list.
Potholes of 1.5 metres in diameter are common, sometimes up to 20cm in depth. Unmarked speedhumps, lanes that merge with no warning, completely unmarked lanes, etc.
And the thing that strikes me as ridiculous about the highways up here is that they have exit and entry lanes in the fast lane!?!?

What's that all about...? (You are trying to creep onto a highway at around 25 mph as a stream of eye-bulging, cell-phone-using aggressive drivers scream past at 100 mph... and slowly-but-surely your little piece of slip lane is running out before your eyes... )

I haven't driven in Italy or Australia yet, but that sounds like fun, too!

I have a 4 inch scar on my ear from playing road warriors on the panamerican highway in Guatemala for a few years. I can not even begin to describe the incredible things I seen drivers do there. Things I did not think the law of physics permitted. For example, 4 buses, two semi trucks, a dozen small cars, on a two lane mountain road all passing eachother at the same time (I mean in parallel on the road, on shoulder of the road, and in the ditch) while going around a blind curve with an oncoming line of 30 or so cars led by a double wide tractor trail loaded with earth moving equipment. I am serious. I am not exaggerating. If I had not been caught in the middle of it, I would not have believed it myself. That is not even where I got in the accident. We all survived that.

I believe it violates law that two things can not occupy the same space at the same time. No one ever checked to see if more than a dozen things can occupy the same space at the same time in Guatemala. Every other Latin American country I have been in is very similar. I have lost more than one friend to car accidents in Central America.

So, driving in Chile is about as good as it gets in Latin America for driving.

I have to say,we have zig and zagged across Chile, from Arica to Chiloe and spent in total, several months of vacation time and really didn't find the driving particularly bad. Santiago can be trying but so are most cities, I was recently on the beltway in the DC area and that scares me much worse than Chile.

jgb78uk wrote:I haven't driven in Italy or Australia yet, but that sounds like fun, too!

Driving in Australia in general is quite good and enjoyable (if driving can be enjoyable).. its just the small city of Perth in Western Australia that makes driving difficult due to aggressive drivers on the roads.. Sydney, Melbourne & Brisbane were all nice cities to drive in.. so like here in Chile.. Santiastico maybe a nightmare to drive in but I have found the parts I have driven in to be ok and not as bad as you describe from your experience... but road conditions are something else.. pot holes everywhere.. and band aid solutions to road problems are quite common here... but thats Chile..