27. If There is no White Line

By Don

Is it still white line fever? Cycling out of Nyiregyhaza we ended up on a really busy road with no shoulder and no white line. And I mean really busy. And then it started to rain, as in buckets. Big trucks whizzing by throwing up water. At one point a semi was rushing up behind me and I was facing a stream of oncoming cars. I hit the gravel shoulder. After he passed I tried to climb the 3 inch edge to get back on the pavement. I failed. Me and the bike slid across the wet pavement toward the oncoming lane. Not good. Really not good.

And so? People stopped to ask if I was OK as I crawled off the road. At least that is what I thought they were saying in Hungarian. Of course they had to stop as I had done a yard sale and so what they could have been saying was “stupid tourist, what are you doing riding in this pissing rain on a busy highway with no shoulders. If you would have gotten killed it would have served you bloody right. Idiot.” We will never know, but we do know two things. One, we put a bit more blood on the saddle and two, they would have been right.

Hungarian Drivers

There is a word in Hungarian for the drivers here.  Not a direct translation but the gist of it in English is ‘assholes’.  Now not all of them are, of course, just most of them.  It started within one kilometer of the border.  Dennis was starting down a hill and one oncoming car decided to pass another and of course to do this he had to use Dennis’ lane.  Nothing like someone coming straight at you at 120 km/hr.  Dennis did the logical thing and got off the road.  “Hungarian drivers are assholes”.  “Now Dennis”, I replied, “it is a little early to say all Hungarian drivers are assholes.”  Well we have cycled through the country now and I must say Dennis pretty well nailed it in the first few minutes.  Very prescient.

There is logic to their driving, twisted though it may be. They work on the 4 second rule. If you are only going to slow them down for 4 seconds or less that is OK. But over 4 seconds and the amount of risk they are prepared to expose you to is equal to the amount of time delayed in seconds. So, for example, if they think you could slow them down by 5 seconds they are prepared to accept a 5% chance of killing you to avoid it. To avoid a potential 20 second delay they are prepared to accept a 20% chance of killing you. So what happens if they feel you could delay them by 100 seconds. Well then they will kill you by attempting to pass when blatantly unsafe to do so. Ha, you say, your just making this up, why aren’t there dead cyclists all over Hungary. Well, three reasons.

1. There are a lot of good cycle paths getting you in and out of the cities, some starting 20 km out. This is money spent by the government to avoid building up the body count.

2. There are not very many cyclists.

3. And this is the big one, cyclists quickly understand the risk and cycle accordingly. When a car comes up behind you, you know he is going to pass if there are no oncoming cars. If there is an oncoming car just going by he will slow down until that car has finished going by. In all other circumstances he is going to pass. If there is a semi truck coming at you carrying a big load and hogging more than his lane followed by a stream of other cars, the guy behind is going to pass you even though he doesn’t have the room. And he isn’t going to hit the semi. You get off the road.