Now that we’ve been living here in Bari for the past five
months, we thought we could share some of our experiences getting around
here. We have a car, a mission-owed Toyota
Yaris, a hybrid electric that gets an astonishing 58 miles per gallon (4.06
liters per 100 km)! We’re very grateful
for this fuel economy since gasoline runs around $7.50 per gallon. The car is pretty small, and we really have
to move the front seats up when we drive others around. Being a hybrid electric, it can accelerate quite
quickly. We’re also grateful to have a
small car because parking here in Bari (and pretty much anywhere else in Italy)
is such a pain. I can’t imagine trying
to park our Subaru Outback here—there just simply isn’t any room, even if you
can find an open space. We drove down to
Lecce a few weeks ago to attend a district council meeting and when we arrived,
I dropped Liz off at the door and then spent the next 45 minutes driving around
looking for a parking spot—and they were all paid parking spots I was looking
for! Around our home here in Bari,
parking has improved as it has gotten hotter.
Back in Winter and Spring, we often had to circle around for a few
minutes before heading “to the fence”, an area that often had open parking
about 300 yards away from our front door.
Driving here in Italy is an adventure all its own! It’s a little hard to describe it other than
it’s all pretty aggressive. Red stop
lights seem to mean that only four cars are allowed to run them. When making a left turn, I have to watch for
other cars cutting around me on my left or even on my right. Right-turn and left-turn-only lanes are good
for going straight as long as you can quickly zip around the guy in the
straight-only lane—or not. And horn
honking is an artform all its own! I
only wish I had a large air horn on the back of my car to respond to all the
horn honkers coming up behind me! The
worst are the motorcyclists, which zip around and through and all over traffic
like large swarms of mosquitos. The most
astounding thing for me is that all this traffic chaos doesn’t seem to result in
very many traffic accidents! In our five
months here, I can only think of one or two accidents that we’ve come across.
The streets here present their own challenges. Unlike the meticulous grid system laid out in
Utah and other more modern cities, the streets in Bari have evolved over it’s
2,000-year history. The roads meander between
the many apartment blocks, with little to no attention to urban planning. Very few of the streets have street signs, so
navigating by street names is challenging.
Fortunately, Google Maps is a lifeline here for getting around. In addition, Liz and I have developed a few of
our own landmarks to get around. We have
“Tree in the Street”, “Skatepark Church”, “Cement Tire”, “Foot-Wide Sidewalk”, “Orange
Pet Store”, and “World’s Worst Roundabout” just to name a few. By now, I can navigate most of Bari without
the aid of Google Maps. The one
exception is the part of Bari on the north side of the rail lines, where we rarely
venture by car. We’ve never driven into
Bari Vecchia (Old Bari) due to it being in a dreaded ZTL, or limited-traffic
zone, which comes with big fines of €80 or more!
Being assigned as YSA missionaries to the Puglia Stake,
means we spend a lot of time on the road (nearly 15K miles in five months) to
other cities in the Puglia and Calabria Regions, so we get practice on the
local highways and AutoStradas (toll roads).
The highways are divided for the most part, with guard rails along the entirety
of the road, with an occasional pull out every kilometer or so. The pull outs also function as personal garbage
dumps, some quite impressive. Roadway
shoulders are non-existent on the divided highways, though the AutoStradas do have
some shoulder. The two-lane roads are
most exciting, especially in the no-passing zones, which really mean move over
as far as you can because oncoming traffic is going to pass into your lane
anyway! As with the city driving, we’re
surprised at the lack of accidents in spite of the aggressive and chaotic
driving we see here. Most astonishing is
that there is no road rage—everyone seems to take it all in stride as they make
their way. My one disclaimer is that you’d
better watch out for me when I get home and back on the roads in Orem!
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| Tree in the Street |
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| Cement Tire |
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| Foot-wide Sidewalk |
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| Skate Park Church |
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| Our Street |
